Freitag, 10. Januar 2014

Find your pace ... and be prepared

Finding the right pace will be a challenge when you work on personal projects and when you actually work as a freelancer or as an employee.
People might tell you that working in an IT environment is stressful and frustrating. Finding the right pace and being prepared helps with that, though.
Frustration is a sign that you are trying to do something in a way that you can not reasonably do it (at the time).

Problem 1 - Moving too fast: This is probably the more common pitfall. You think a task or project should be pretty doable and you realize that it takes a lot more to do the job properly. That is usually when you are tempted to rush (compare: http://blog.activelylazy.co.uk/2011/02/09/if-i-had-more-time-i-would-have-written-less-code/). Know your goals, invest the time to get the desired result and if it takes longer than anticipated try to think about it as a valuable lesson that you just learned.

Problem 2 - Moving too slow: I think sometimes you might end up not moving ahead when you have gotten code to run and fall in love with the result. You start tweaking and rerunning the program when you could move on to the next bigger challenge and save tweaking for later. Don't be too ambitious, though. Enjoying victories is nice from time to time.



When you study at a university the pace is pretty much set in stone. What helps here is being prepared. Try to make sure you have read a little about a topic and maybe gained some hands on experience before things get serious.
If you are still working on a game plan, consider studying out of your league for a while in order to have that advantage when you start studying at your school / academy of (primary) choice. Another benefit: you won't have any "what if I only ..." regrets later or you might even realize that you are not studying out of your league at all.

When you already have a basic understanding of some of the topics, then the new information will stick a lot better. You already have a foundation in place. Your brain just needs to store a diff.
Also read general books that help with being prepared.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People helps a lot it you are trying to come up with a game plan.
Then, based on the result, you might want to check out other books (from general books towards specialized books ... usually the general ones provide more value).

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