Forward Motion

The past three days have been tremendously more effective than I expected or hoped.  My focus on tasks has been great.   By concentrating on seeing each and every small success, I've has some really positive feelings at the end of my work-periods.

I've basically 'switched off' the not-enough mental trap that I identified earlier this week.  And it's been super!

The Curse of 'Finished'

The way I look at success varies considerably depending on what I'm talking about.  With most roles, I take every little step forward as a win.  A good conversation with one of my kids, being patient with my wife when she's angry, even little things like eating healthily all get chalked up as victories and things I feel proud of at the end of the day.

But not with my programming.

No matter how much I accomplish or how magical my coding day has gone, it's never enough.  It's never 'done'.  The idea of being 'finished' takes on a monstrous aspect when I apply it to programming.  Which is weird, because, in my head, I know that programming projects are never 'finished'.  There's always more bugs, more efficiencies, more features, and more documentation that could be done on it.  No matter how big or how small it is.  I know this.  So why do I fixate on, "Crap.  It's not done."?

Emotionally, this is all quite devastating.  I am punishing myself whether I do a good job or a poor one as a computer-nerd - with no way to win.  And I don't like to play games I can't win.

This is really exceptionally strange (from a logical perspective) because programming is the only thing I look at in this manner.  I'm still trying to figure out why I do this to myself, and I think I'm making a bit of progress.  But, as with most odd mental blocks, it's very difficult to see what is really going on.

What I need to do is to put the brakes on this 'can't-win' cycle.  That just drives me away from my work.  It's draining and emotionally it's 'teaching me' (in a limbic sense) to stay away from programming altogether.  Something that I love.  That pisses me off.  Nobody gets to push me around - not even me!  LOL!

I'm writing up a list of small things that I do that I can be proud of in my programming work.  Solving a problem.  Figuring out how to make an interface clean.  Making code maintainable.  Communicating with clients and not stonewalling them behind an emotionless forcefield of sociopathic relaxation or escapism.  It's very hard to look at my programming like this because small victories don't result in a finished report or process for clients.  But if I want to keep working as a programmer, this is what I'm going to have to do.

I'll post more about how this is going later...

Temporal Trouble

I seem to have a major issue with my perception of time.  Naturally, I should perceive it as flowing forward.  Unfortunately, my temporal thought process gets stuck on the backlog of missed deadlines and tasks that have been on my 'to-do' list for literally years.  Or my wacky brain goes shooting into the future, calculating future probabilities and prerequisites.  I need to focus on the NOW, but I get caught in a whirlpool of review or a planning of sequences.  When focusing on the past, I feel negative and when focusing on the future, I feel overwhelmed.  Overloading myself with a cataloging of the past mixed with sequences of future contingencies.  It's almost like my internal perception of time is broken, somehow.  It's certainly very ineffective in terms of getting stuff done.  Lots of mental churn.

How do I combat this?  By actively forcing myself in the present.  This is very hard for me to do!  It's quite exhausting, to be brutally honest.  But my best programming comes during a 'timeless' state of mind.  I slip into The Zone and time fades away as a mental construct.

The net result is that I must separate my cognitive mind from the flow of time completely in order to produce output.  This does awful things to my ability to come up with correct estimates!  (I also fear that it projects an aura of uncaring or ignorance toward others.)  I remain hopeful that I can find a new cognitive method someday, but thus far, I remain limited in my options.  Which means there is more work to be done on myself.