After some reflection during a day of work I identified two major problems with the way I am working:

1. Approaching a task with the wrong mental scope. Instead of sitting down at my desk and thinking "I'm going to design one of the two code widgets I have to create today", I mire myself in the dreadful thought of chipping away at an enormous month-long portion of a larger solution. While its true that almost everything I write is part of a larger whole, that's really not the point.

2. Repeating the process of solving things I have already solved. By not clearly delineating simple processes, I often wind up going through the same rote that I went through the day or week before -- or getting an error message that I resolved through trial and error the day before but forgot to record the process. This is less of a code problem and more of a IDE issue, but if its likely I'm going to repeating a process I should record what machinations it took to do the first time.

Tomorrow I'll try to come up with some good solutions to these issues. Any helpful suggestions are welcome in the comments below.

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