In high school, my herd of guy friends had an annual tradition of making a pilgrimage to White Castle, a grease-a-licious fast food chain that serves square hamburgers for great justice. There weren't any of these establishments in humble Connecticut, so our quest required us to either take a ferry to Long Island or ride a train into New York City. These trips don't seem nearly as epic now as they felt at the time, but when you've only been driving for a few months, everything qualifies as an adventure.
On one particular journey my buddy Sam came up with the idea of buying extra hamburgers to donate to a local homeless shelter. He brought his camera along, intending to make a documentary about the whole ordeal. The operation ran smoothly and we got plenty of good footage, but in the weeks that followed, Sam confessed that he was having a hard time putting it together into something that he was happy with. He explained that if he ever let the project sit for more than a day, he found it extremely difficult to get back into it once he picked it up again. In order to counter this, he would force himself to do something, anything, even the smallest of changes, every single day until it was finished.
As soon as he described this process to me, I realized that it closely matched the way that I went about all of my long-term projects -- learning songs on guitar, writing articles on Wikipedia, and putting together an online Rubik's Cube tutorial. I instinctively avoided long periods of inactivity, though it wasn't until my conversation with Sam that I put any thought into the matter. Once I became fully aware of it, this became my main strategy for avoiding demotivation, and I've stuck with it for years.
Last week, however, a brand new strategy mysteriously popped into my head, as though my brain had grown bored and wanted me to come up with a new way of doing things. I was writing out a tab for a song that I had been working on, and when I got close to the end of the song, I stopped and thought "Well, you've just finished an hour, why not leave the tab like it is and finish tomorrow?" followed shortly thereafter by "Golly, self, that's a great idea!" There are some days when I don't have a clear idea of what I want to work on, which causes practicing to descend into pointless noodling that quickly grows boring, but not this time! By leaving the tab unfinished, I gave myself something to be excited about completing the next time I practiced.
I quickly began applying this idea to other areas. On Friday night I was working on my final computer science project, a Java version of the Othello board game. I was working on the move validation code when I ran into a stupid little error that I knew I would be able to troubleshoot in a few minutes of tinkering. I knew that if I fixed the problem and finished that chunk of code, I would start the next day thinking "Ah, shit, now I have to start writing methods for enemy capture. I think I'll just procrastinate instead." Instead, I left the bug just as it was and went to bed. Sure enough, the next day I found myself excited to fix the issue, and with that momentum I went on to write all of the enemy capture code in under an hour.
Stopping at a natural stopping point may feel natural, but stopping just short of one is a much better way of preserving your constructive energy for later on. In fact, I'm such a firm believer of this idea that I'm not even going to finish writing this sente
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Week 23 total: 23.5 hours
Grand total: 560 hours
Required pace: 442.5 hours (+117.5)
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