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by nicbou 1024 days ago
I don't. I try to stick to specific goals and limit how much work in progress I have at any given time. Being aware of my impulsive tendencies helps a lot.

However for the most part I just ride the waves. I'd rather work full steam towards a secondary objective than at half power on the most important thing. I learned to harness hyperfocus instead of fighting it.

This suits the nature of my work. It's a website. It stays online and keeps generating income. It's a lot more forgiving than a development job with specific deliverables. So long as I'm generally improving the website, I'm doing fine. In some cases, these side projects proved wildly successful.

Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect. Following my impulses leads to a lot of interesting magic.

At a lower level, I try to avoid git branches. I work on master, so I only have one or two things going at any given time. I don't start two massive article rewrites at once, because it makes staging too confusing.

At a business level, I taught everyone I work with that I work slowly, and not to expect anything on a specific date. Things get done when they get done. The biggest challenge is to avoid promising anything when I'm in my "excited about stuff" phase. It helps that I'm paid per lead, so if they get nothing from me, they pay nothing.

1 comments

I don’t get your git strategy - don’t you work with other people and have code reviews? And it’s not like branching means more things in progress - you can work on one dev/feature branch at a time.
With or without others, it's not uncommon. Even in some big companies (Facebook and Google) teams use this:

https://www.abtasty.com/glossary/trunk-based-development/

I use trunk-based development too and it's not the same as avoiding branches and working on the main branch. With trunk-based you still do all of your work on a branch - the difference between trunked-based and gitflow is how long the side branches live and where releases happen from.
I work alone. Yes, it means mostly working on a single thing, with only a few minor commits in between.
I have a similar workflow. I’m the only programmer in my office and just use git to make my life easier.