I've consumed two Red Bulls a day, slept about an hour or two a night until Friday. The entire time I wasn't out getting food once or twice a day I was sitting at the computer pounding out code to the bass beat of fast moving trance music from my podcast list or the soothing melodies of the solo piano station from Sky.FM. Every few hours along the process my mood would change and I'd switch the music around to help carry me through whatever task I was working on.

I've been stressing out because I've been trying to put the finishing touches on a huge ASP.NET project I've been working on for the last month, and there's so much still to be done. When I got back, I dived straight into what I thought was going to be a death march but turned into a reminder of what it was like to feel my brain cells firing on all cylinders like it did when I was 19 years old and running on a steady diet of TV dinners and Mountain Dew. I had nothing to worry about but the code on the screen and whether I should completely remove or vent the plastic film over the vegetables. I've missed it.

Instead of worrying about the scope of the project and working myself into a frenzy over all the things I needed to plan for, I just decided to write things until they worked and then refactor the hell out of them later. Every day I wrote five new items on the whiteboard and just kept writing until that one was done before moving on to the next step. Watching the code and systems coalesce around these atomic iterative steps was fantastic. In a way it was like spending 10 minutes to work out the big-picture project, then turning my "Project Manager" mind off completely by focusing deeply and entirely at that single task at hand.

I think that if I ever had or have a project manager that's capable of setting my mind so at ease about the bigger picture that those smaller tasks are all I have to worry about, I would absolutely love the work I do every day. Unfortunately, I'm never reluctant to take my own project management responsibilities over when they're abdicated by someone else (for whatever reason) because I always want to do a good job on a project and I'm pretty good at big picture architecture thinking when I need to be.

Unfortunately, when I do this I wind up with a focus and concern about the project on multiple levels that decreases my focus and productivity by easily a factor of 2 pi. I wish there was some environment where I was able to trust the system around me so implicitly (and vice versa) that I could feel this motivated and at ease all the time. I hope that I can use this experience to better express my needs where I am now and see if I can create the proper support structure to make me love my work again and as a result be as effective and efficient as possible.

Thankfully the week came to a surprising end and I was finally able to, with a clean conscience, drive down to meet Teresa for Ethiopian cuisine in Adams Morgan and drinks in Dupont Circle. After I flaked out on my promise to meet up after DorkBot DC on Tuesday she was my sympathetic ear and cheerleader for the rest of the week to stay on track and get all this work done. It was only fitting that I had her delightful company to look forward to all week, and as a reward for making it all the way to Friday.

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