[lowercased]

> The rest of my time is crazy productive

Maybe if you weren't "crazy productive" during those spurts, and maybe just "productive", you might not get in to as many situations where you can't even figure out how to figure out your problem?

I hear you - there definitely is a 'mess' factor to a lot of web tech. I've been doing this 20 years and still find that to be the case - moreso now today than 20 years ago. Most of my messes are someone else's making - I'm taking over a project that's undocumented, untested and often unbuildable. All those factors add in to the 'mess', and perhaps people just think it's 'normal'?

If the problems you're seeing are on projects you're building yourself from scratch, I'd recommend doing the 'productive' parts more slowly, perhaps spend time writing some tests, or docs, or even just re-explaining what you've done to someone else - the logic flow, where data is coming/going/etc. It may help you find problems earlier, and understand them better.