Failure

Well, another week, another failure. But it's a different failure and, as so often in programming, sometimes a different failure is the best kind of progress you're going to get.

This was a kind of compound failure where my goal for releasing the commitment platform I committed to last week conflicted with my new rules for when I count a failure at writing. I'm happy enough with the sacrifice I made (the commitment platform is coming as my next post), but I'm not sure it was strictly necessary to make that sacrifice at all.

In reality, the flexibility I built into my posting commitment should have helped me in this situation, but I was already one behind from the previous day. That says near miss to me: being a post behind became a fairly common state rather than an emergency. I'm beginning to think that this flexibility thing might be more trouble than it's worth.

A separate but related near miss is that, despite my good intentions with planning work on the commitment platform, I still did the bulk of it at the last minute. I did some design and planning earlier in the week that was actually very helpful, but not enough to significantly spread my workload out through the week. I got it done, but I didn't get it done comfortably. In fact, I would say I barely scraped over the line.

I think the issue was that I put effort into estimating time, but I didn't make much effort to schedule that time earlier in the week. I'm going to try that with the next big chunk of work I dedicate myself to, but that probably won't be until the following week so I can have some time to recharge and polish the stuff I did this week.