Unstable State

I just got back from a long break of over a month. I spent two and a half weeks in Champaign, IL, giving a training for my former employer and two weeks doing Jeep Safari in Morocco.

Morocco was great. We had 6 days with the Jeeps, traveling through the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara Desert.  My pictures are still under development (the camera I'm holding is a film SLR), I'll post some more soon.

It's very hard for me to focus back on my software. I did a critical mistake and started changing the design just before I left. Before I took off, I got some new ideas and decided it was not too late to implement them. The thing is, I had about a day of work left. I knew it will not be enough for me to implement all the changes and I knew that leaving the system in an unstable state is going to hurt me. Yet, wasting a day of work was too much.

It's now really hard to get back on track. I'm seriously considering undoing what I did in the last day and starting over. Luckily, I took some time to document my ideas before I jumped into implementing them, so it shouldn't be too hard. My main lesson is: if you know you're going to leave your system for some time, document as much as you can.

It also reminds me of a blog post I read some time ago, which discussed techniques for working efficiently. One of the ideas was not to set up any appointments. For example, if I set up an appointment at 11:00, I will not start anything major in the morning, since I know it's going to be interrupted. When I return, half the day is gone and it will take me time to get back to focus.

The original post claims you should not keep any schedule and only meet people ad-hoc. If you can do that, great. If not, here are some other ideas for mitigation:

• Set up the meetings in the early morning or late afternoon (or evening).
• Work on small issues. I keep a list of smaller to do items that can be done in less than an hour. This is good for "filling the gaps".
• Document before coding. Then start working on the major issue and it will be easier to get back to it later.