There's a Bikeshed In The Forest

Into The Forest We Go

So lately I've been inundated with a (IMHO) very aggressive project schedule; and when I say "project", I mean projects plural since the ending of the first one overlapped with some of the discovery & design portion of the second one. Which is fine, since I've done that many of times. Though, somewhere along the schedule of the second project I started having more and more bikeshed'ing talks. Be it that I was busy or if I wasn't completely focused due to personal reasons, I fed into these bikeshed'ing talks and they kept coming and I sunk like quicksand.

Painting the Bikeshed

For those of you who come from a BSD background, you all have probably heard the "painting the bikeshed" phrase. If not, go and give it a read; even if you aren't part of the *nix scene or even if you're not an engineer; the thread will shed some light on managing projects whether personal or work-related.

Anyhow, in a brief summation: somewhere, somehow, I got sidetracked with tasks of changing certain language of front-end and etc. design-related issues as opposed to working on core-code functionality. In turn, the project needed to delay a bit.

Lesson learned: Be more vocal. Yes, let the PM know that there are bigger issues at hand and you'll get back to the miniscule issues at a later time.

Forest? Huh?

So what's the bikeshed have to do with the forest? Well, another phrase has been echoing in my brain a lot lately, and that's "can't see the forrest for the trees". It has a similar premise behind it and I thought it was very fitting, being that I've caught myself (twice now), wasting time debugging code to only later see that there was a simple error that was causing issues; the more recent issue was actually a human error and not code-related at all.

Lesson learned here: it's okay to step away for a bit to rest your brain (and your eyes!) from code.

Cheers! Code. Debug. Repeat.

Post Script

* My one delayed project was only delayed three days. We are now just maintaining code and debugging small bugs.