Programmers Block

Does anyone else ever get this or is it just me? What I'm talking about is a deep mental block that destroys productivity. Your mind is full of ideas, but when you sit down to try to realize them you get nowhere and your mind just starts to wander.

I have this problem in a big way, I sometimes go for days or even weeks at a time where I can do absolutely nothing productive with the computer. Over the last few months I've been trying to battle this and to figure out how to control it so that I can be happier with myself. So far I've had very limited success and it's a very frustrating experience.

First you sit down and try to do something but for some reason it just doesn't feel right, so you go and do something else and that doesn't feel right, and on and on. What's the worst is when you start to get mad at yourself for not being productive. At that point you're just lost, I often tend to completely crash then and end up sleeping 18 hours straight or something. That's a huge waste of time and you wake up feeling like utter crap which makes it even harder to get your mind back in gear. It's like a deep downward spiral that is seemingly impossible to pull yourself out of.

I call it programmers block because I recently read a couple books on writers block. I figured it's a similar activity and the symptoms may also be similar. It turns out they are exactly the same and reading those books has been the one thing that has helped with the situation.

I think my biggest problem is that I have big ideas. I constantly get these grand visions for some great new technology or piece of software or service or what ever and my adrenaline really gets pumping. I sit down, sketch it out and then start thinking about how great it's going to be when it's done. Boom, crash, there's the mistake. It's that vision of greatness that's a killer. Why? Because your mind gets about 100 steps ahead of reality and then when you sit down to try to turn it into a working system the mountain you've built seems too large to climb. Basically it's day-dreaming and dreams are often far removed from reality. This is something the books on writers block made very clear, the number one enemy of writers around the world is self doubt. That mountain of an idea that you have, even if you can envision how great it will be when it works, looks 100 times larger when you actually have to put all the pieces together to make it work. You look at that and reality sets in, and at least for me, I have a bad habit of crashing into a complete state of no productivity. I get frustrated with my inability to make progress then start to doubt my ability to do anything at all, and the situation just becomes ugly.

So how do you combat this? I really don't know for sure, but I do know it helps to think small. It especially helps to avoid the dangerous day-dreaming of greatness. I'm trying to consciously watch for this and kick myself every time I find myself thinking about how great something will be without actually working on it. My success has still been limited however. For instance I just came off a four day crash over the weekend. I did manage to dig myself out of it by forcing myself to just tackle a tiny little piece of a project, then the next little piece and so on. With this I was finally able to put together some good productive hours. Unfortunately it's hard, I tried and failed to do the same thing several times during the weekend. It doesn't help the situation any that I"m still battling pain in my wrists which tends to make me want to stay away from the computer too.

I know that other people have this problem. How do you beat it?

Posted by Kimbro Staken