I’m guilty of wanting to do too much

I’ve gone from not working at all, except for a few small gigs here and there, to a combination of construction and demolition cleanup, yardwork, gravel-spreading and now laying rock walls! As a result, my suntan is getting much nicer, thanks! These jobs are still temporary, but until I find something more permanent, I’m fairly sure I can get daily or close to daily work out of them. We’ll see how that goes.

I’ve finally got some of the enthusiasm and motivation back for a programming project I’d been working on furiously this month. I started it a couple of weeks ago and had completed quite a bit of it, but when I started working during the day I had less energy to program at night. But during the past two days, I’ve managed to quash several bugs and add a few new features with a lot more speed and efficiency than I’d been working right before I stopped.

As I noted somewhere else, my goal is to complete this project before starting a new one; in that vein, I’ve been writing down all my “Cool New Ideas” on my computer so that I can return to them when I’m done with this, rather than allow them to dominate my thinking right now.

When programming – and now that I think of it, in much of my life – I’m guilty of wanting to do too much, to take on more than I can reasonably handle, and discourage myself from finishing because I either want to heap every neat new thing into it, and to sculpt a perfect creation, or want to give up because I know by the time I actually add in all those new things, someone else will have done it too. This program has really been an exercise in restraint for me when it comes to features. It’s not that I won’t add them in; I decided, however, to get a fully functioning base working first, get some people testing it, and then add in the new ideas as the program matures. Instead of continually adding features to a never-ready project, I’m going to reach a usable version first, then add.

I’ve tried to do it before. So this will be a litmus test whether or not the other changes I’ve made in my life over the past year have helped my ability to cope with the downsides of ADD.