My New Discovery About Me

So I figured something out about myself the other day. I have a tendency to let personal projects (both of the knitting and coding varieties) languish when I get to a small but uninspiring hurdle. Take these two-color socks I had been working on. (Right, had been working on.)

I plowed through the cuff and leg of this one pretty fast, only to be derailed by some directions which took me awhile to comprehend. After spending a decent amount of brain power over what to do where, I have since got distracted by another personal project. Now I have been off the sock project for a couple of weeks and have somehow convinced myself that restarting it is going to be this monumental task. Really, it will only take me ten minutes to figure it out and get through the tricky part, but somehow this seems like an onerous task. Projects that offer more instant gratification get in the way.

I apparently do this a lot. I now realize that I have stalled out on the Kai Sweater in much the same way. I ran out of two colors on that one, which slowed my progress, and then when I finally found the two colors, I had to pick up the knitting and recalculate where I was. The momentum had been lost, though, and I moved on to other things.

This also happened with KnitML. I reached a point where I needed to redesign a segment of the markup at the same time that coding for work became far more inspiring. Before I even realized it, a month had passed without me even attempting a redesign of the current markup.

Clearly I need to recognize these hurdles earlier on, because the longer I put off jumping over them, the bigger they seem to grow.

Comments

JustApril said…
That's probably a common issue. It's why I force myself to one project at a time, that way I have to push thru the obstacles if I want to knit.
Anonymous said…
When I realize that I have left a project (of any kind) go I get out my timer and tell myself that I will only work on it for 15 minutes. Many times by the time the timer rings I have made it over the hump and I'm enjoying the project again so I keep going. -- Blogless Grace
Unknown said…
Ah that is so familiar. The T-shirt quilt just sat for a month because the blocks were too big. The blocks are now narrower but I haven't figured out the overall length yet. Time to let it sit and simmer again - but hopefully not so long this time.

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