Often, when a project reaches a certainly early/mid scale where I'm tackling some of the bigger problems, I'll push myself to work on it a little longer and finish it. If I might normally finish at 10pm, I'll push myself and go till 11:00 or midnight and finish the system.
Then, because it's so late, I tend to just close everything out. And because I've just completed a milestone, I'm faced with not only getting back into flow, but beginning the process of designing/implementing a whole new big thing.
It's at this point I really start to stumble, and I've lost a lot of projects to, "Whew, just finished that awesome system, I'm sure I'll pick this back up soon!" and I am at a total loss of how to power past these moments.
If anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears.
Or failing that, 15 minutes of cranking out garbage code that I know I'll revert helps get back into flow state too, but it's demoralizing deleting work.
You there's no concept of "scale" to something like this. Save a snack, a small task, for your brain to munch on in the morning, and you'll get in the routine much better than on an empty stomach.
What did however was an analysis of 1) what I did yesterday and 2) what I want to today. I started with just typing my head off for about 30 mins every morning. At first it was thoughts all over the place. As I kept at it and pushed through, over a few weeks on I could see patterns emerge. I could read what going on yesterday, a week ago or a couple of sprints ago or a release ago and see how things have evolved. This helped separating the important stuff from the fluff. This was what I needed to focus on. I now log the important stuff. Takes about 10 minutes a day and gets me in the flow of things. Totally worth the effort in time and mental cycles spent.
The author presents a lot of seemingly complex tools for this. Mine are, I believe, simpler -- a TODO list in .org mode (goal and next), and git log (for what just happened, always with --name-status to show what files were affected how, and maybe with -p to show the diff).
But you could use anything.
There is also https://github.com/alphapapa/outshine
Which gives you "full" orgmode in comment sections of your normal source code (haven't actually tried it myself).
Overall I think you are on the right track with your goals but, yes, orgmode does a great job of solving them already with a bunch of additional features too.
I have a dev log in org mode. Any thoughts about what I'm working on go there. Including TODOs. It's always open, so there is no open/save/close process.
Of course, I have to update it. But it's just one more file that gets updated. It's not onerous.
Plus, I'm not destroying documentation about my development process. I have used this method since I started developing professionally 15 years ago. I can go back over a decade and look into why I did certain things for a piece of code and how I decided to break the work apart.
The organizing principle of the todo document is problems. The organizing principle of the code is something else -- control, data. Perhaps ideally they would align, but in my experience they don't.
Getting back into the swing of things is effortless. You can switch between projects within literally 2 seconds. It's so easy to resume exactly where you left off from the previous session. There's no need to tinker with window layouts or re-open code editors.
Last month I made a video that goes over this workflow at (8:02 is the specifics on switching between projects): https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/using-tmux-sessions-windows-p...
With GUI editors you'd have to use session / project files and then manually open / close your 1 instance of that editor when you switch between projects. It's kind of a clumsy experience (but doable).
Then again, if more amateur fiction writers did one thing well, I think that fiction in general would be improved.
I world build, draw out maps, plan characters then never write. Sometimes I wonder if I just enjoy world building. But I think I'm just intimidated.
Writing notes helps commit things to memory better for me too. Also, using paper to write notes is less of a distraction than using an electronic medium to write notes in this day and age.
(For context, I am a game designer at AAA studio and I write a lot of code.)
>I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
-Ernest Hemingway
https://dianedrake.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Hemingway-...
The mentioned kanban software, `kanboard`[1], is super easy to setup and use -- I did a survey of about 10 self-hosted kanban software tools and this was definitely a front-runner in terms of overall simplicity and ease of setup and use. I did not review the plugin architecture at the time, but glad to hear that it is fairly straightforward.
“Completed ABC; TODO XYZ”
“WIP ABC; TODO XYZ”
When I get back, all I have to do is check the previous commit.
