"On the heels of the failure of a project where I have spent weeks building up for, I will quickly force myself to do routine molecular biology, or general lab tasks, or a repeat of an experiment that I have gotten to work in the past."
I wonder what the equivalent would be for a programmer/software engineer? Prototyping? Proof of concepts?
I often find myself spending a lot of time on a new framework/architecture only to realize it didn't really accomplish the task at hand.
Even simpler. Cleaning up code, fixing minor bugs, (simple) performance optimization, etc. Small things that add some value and are almost guaranteed to succeed.
What I have started doing is working on a vastly reduced version of bigger projects that I want to accomplish. You could call them prototypes, but I try not to saddle myself with the baggage of the larger project...
I use the larger project as a starting point for deriving the smaller project, but once I've got the small project defined, I do my best not to be hindered by the larger project ideas and just work the smaller project by itself.
I try to make it small enough to finish in a weekend.
I wonder what the equivalent would be for a programmer/software engineer? Prototyping? Proof of concepts?
I often find myself spending a lot of time on a new framework/architecture only to realize it didn't really accomplish the task at hand.