Planning a Days Work When Brain is Slow to Turn-Over

Trying to impose the structure of the day upon my free-wheeling brain. As might be apparent in my recent entries, I'm a bit distracted these days. Lots of time off, and some travel and time around home makes you shift your career into the background somewhat, and getting back into the pace, even on a 4day workweek, a bit tough.

My side project is software based, with both a web-based and stand-alone components. I have a good basic structure for the web-based element, and now the other part - an executable app with some network capability needs to get going, and I'm very slow jumping in. I've got a rough document taking a swag at a UI based on the stuff that has to happen. The app will need several different personalities. I want to think about those a bit before I start anything, but I don't want to get too distracted doing the whole thing. Rather I need to make one personality work (while not precluding the others) and then move forward on getting that up. My need is to get an end-to-end solution in place for rough demos, then to start polishing,improving performance etc.

The blank page, the tyranny of the blank page, I often call it, is the scourge of creative endeavour. Many people don't realize this, and I often direct my staff to just start with creating some shell documents, some application shell, to get the project moving forward. The planning document can go on for ever, as it's often used as an excuse to not get started, even though it's 99% there.

Don't misconstrue this as advocacy for designing stuff without documentation - seems like every start-up I deal with has taken that route. I'm all about planning before action. But I like to have a thorough, generally complete document, rather than a polished book with dust-cover, before starting to build/code stuff.

Anyway, that's my goal for today. Put my planning doc into some basic sense, and get a shell of an application in place so that I can start to fill in gaps.

Researchinator attempts to bridge his blog-based enthusiasm into some actual work for the day...