• Old 15" toshiba laptop running ubuntu.
• Coding on a heavyweight IDE (NetBeans), using subversion.
• Taking notes on a big ass A4 notebook.
• No contributions to open source software at all.

This is what happens when I’m too stressed out. My decision-making ability suddenly goes south, and since I’m way too stubborn to notice, entire days can be lost to either analysis paralysis or incorrect decisions. Like this past weekend.

Here’s how it played out.

I had this awesome idea last Thursday for a project called CarePinger, which I immediately locked in the “really really simple, lol” category. I figured it could be done in a few hours, tops, so why not take the opportunity to throw in some learning action as well. That’s where Cake came in. I’d finally get around to learning CakePHP, and hack a cool project together at the same time. I had nothing to do that weekend, no trips out of town, no paintball games, nothing. It’d be nothing but me and my laptop for two days straight. With so much time on my hands, and my learning speed being the stuff of legend, what could possibly go wrong?

As it turned out, a lot could. A little trip to the shops for some groceries. Cooking lunch and dinner. Caring for my suddenly-ill girlfriend. A hard drive failure. A huge amount of stress from my current job situation. My mind was really not in the right place for some quality learning and coding time, and because I didn’t actually plan a schedule, there was never a 1-2h block when I could sit down uninterrupted and work.

But the worst thing was that I didn’t even stick to the plan. I meant to learn the basics of Cake and then hack out CarePinger on top of it. Well, I didn’t even make it to the end of the first lesson before deciding Cake was far too bloaty a framework for the simple needs of my project, and that maybe I’d be better off using something simpler. Only, I didn’t really want to go with the proven framework I use in Threddie. Oh no. I have another one, still in early-ish stages of development, which is really cool because it’s a RESTful thing of beauty that’s meant to power single-page AJAX apps. It lazy loads everything, has amazing scaffolding capabilities and the only thing that comes out of it is JSON and baby foxes. Obviously, I had to give it a go.

So yeah, by 9pm Saturday evening the plan was already in tatters. Then Roxana had a fever. Work day over.

Sunday was even worse because the clock was ticking and for some reason I hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep. My morning disappeared in a flurry of keyboard strokes as I desperately tried to twist my theoretically perfect RESTful framework into something resembling practical usefulness. The afternoon was even worse. I knew I was melting down when setting up Facebook Connect suddenly seemed impossible. Slowly, I lowered and closed my laptop lid and stepped away from the desk. Five minutes later, I was napping on the couch.

And it was like hitting a reset button. When I woke up, CarePinger no longer sounded like a 4-hour project and I wasn’t in such a hurry to get it done. CakePHP still seemed bloated as hell, but I wasn’t in a hurry to learn it either. The deadlines had been lifted because I realized they never mattered. I realized that learning something new was what was really driving me all along, and the impossibly short timeframe I’d allocated was hurting my determination rather than encouraging my resolve.

So I opened IBM’s excellent tutorial again, redid the first lesson and then the second. I thought it was going slowly as hell, but the funny thing was, when I looked at the clock barely any time had passed. I was back in the Zone, absorbing knowledge like a motherfucker. CarePinger was never going to get off the ground that weekend, but it didn’t matter.

At least I got my mind back.