[dclara]

You reminded me in some cases I did, but I don't feel well about that. But I've already spent too much time on one item, if I didn't quit, it would delay the rest of the tasks.

Most of the time, I have to do extra hours of work to get it completed. Otherwise, it's hard get chance to revisit again unless it's a critical feature or bug.

Another strategy is, just like what you mentioned, once we are stuck at somewhere for more than 4 hours, we have to move to other tasks, give it up temporarily and later on when we come back, maybe things changed or mind changed, it's no longer that hard any more.

[einhverfr]

I have found that if I never get the opportunity, chances are it wasn't important anyway. For a lot of things that seem to be moth-balled, they have an amazing way of coming up later.

For example, a month after I gave up on rewriting the financial logic for LedgerSMB, I got a project that required a small subset of rewritten code there. So I went ahead, took the short cuts required for that, wrote an implementation and such in a half a day, from scratch, when my previous attempt took two weeks with nothing to show from it.

That lead to starting the rewrite again which will begin again in earnest after 1.4 branches off. Instead of budgetting months, I am now budgetting only days.

[dclara]

Yes, budgeting for days instead of budgeting for months. When we well manage the task list, usually a feature implementation takes 1-3 days, a project may take 3-4 weeks to reach a milestone. So no feature can take more than a week to finish. Priority is the key.