Fear Is Slowing Me Down

I’m still working on the UI portion of my eDiscovery engine.  However, it’s been a few days since I’ve made any real progress.  I’ve been busy with my day job and home life, but the more I think about it, I don’t believe my current lack of progress has anything to do with how busy I have been lately.  Instead, I think fear is playing a huge role here.  Combined with what I call “Development Dip”, it’s really become something I need to deal with in order to move on.

First off, the fear comes from all the what-ifs I keep asking myself.  What if nobody buys my software?  What if I finish and find that I need to target a different market?  What if it’s not as good as I think it is?  What if have to tell my family that I spent all these months for nothing?  What if I have to give up because it’s too big for one person to pull off?  I could go on and on with what-ifs.

The “Development Dip”, as I like to call it, is part of the process for me.  When starting on a new project and outlining the requirements, it’s exciting.  When building out the architecture and figuring out what pieces are going to go where and how the system will need to scale over time, that’s a lot of fun too.  Once all of that stuff is out of the way, the coding starts.  This is where the rubber meets the road.  This is where all the late nights and weekends come in to play.  I use an Agile development process and tweak it to work for me.  The idea is to work on the current “items” list and get them done in a certain period of time.  However, since there is no way to know 100% of all the requirements of an application like this up front, there are many times when things will not work as originally designed.  This is normal and part of the development process.  I just need to create a new backlog item and add it to the pool of items to be completed.  Anyway, the Development Dip, for me, comes when I start to realize my forward progress is slower than the growth of my items backlog list – in other words, each day I finish coding (or night in my case), I find myself with more work to do than when I started.  This sometimes gives me an overwhelmed feeling or a feeling that I am moving backwards.

So, when I keep hearing myself say things like “what if nobody will buy my software?” and my TODO list continues to outgrow my DONE list, it does not take long to realize why my productivity is suffering.  I’m literally talking myself out of doing the work that needs to be done. I’m finding “reasons” not to complete my project.

When I look at this objectively, I know that these are the times when I need to keep pushing to get to my next milestone.  As each milestone gets completed, it helps fuel the mission to the next.  I need to reevaluate how I’m setting my milestones and making sure they are not too far apart.  I guess I just need more mini-victories along this journey to stay engaged and energized.

Onwards and upwards…