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My father, a Naval officer, was quite fond of shouting "Do something, even if it's stupid!" I expect that, in the heat of battle, indecision is worse than nothing at all.
Back in the day I worked for Dave Johnson's Working Software. We scored a big contract to port Random House Webster's Electronic Dictionary And Thesaurus College Edition - yes that was its real name - from MS-DOS to Mac OS System 7. Included in our contract was $5,000 "Timely Completion Bonus" of which I would receive $3k but only if I completed the work in the allotted time.
I found myself strangely unable to get started. Dave from time to time would politely ask me whether I had, then finally he got very assertive that I should start.
"Look: if you write anything at all, even if it crashes then you can debug it."
I remembered this recently, and it is working well for me. One must not implement too much buggy code or you will never get it debugged, but writing something bad then fixing it may well be better than not implementing anything at all.
(I got my bonus.)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sigma on Wednesday April 22 2015, @04:03AM
Often that leads to building a tall tower on bad foundation. Eventually you realize that the whole codebase needs to be scrapped and rewritten. Better to spend time on thinking and planning before you initiate an avalanche of bad decisions.
While it's true you have to to avoid the Tall Tower on Bad Foundations or you'll end up with an Avalanche of Bad Decisions, just saying so isn't helpful. What you have to have is a way to invoke the Panic Monster early, and banish the Instant Gratification Monkey to the nearest tree. If you don't, you'll just end up in the Dark Playground or Mixed Feelings Park.
In other words, what you really need to do is identify the Critical Entrance early, and head straight for the Tipping point.
Or you could procrastinate a little longer and read this [waitbutwhy.com]. Don't forget to follow the link to Part Two...
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday April 22 2015, @06:46AM
I wuz gonna post that but I didn't get around to it.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek