At the start of June, I had decided to devote a large chunk of my time to working on one of my current projects. I started reading some source materials, and briefly looked at some of my earlier work. When I look at the calendar, I’m saddened to think about all the time that I’ve wasted since then. Whenever I try to concentrate on the problems I have yet to tackle I feel bored, and I can sense that I don’t have the answers yet.
It’s like trying to play Monopoly without knowing anything about it, nor being able to read the information on the instructions, cards, and board. I need to learn the language so that I can read the rules, but I still have to figure out what that language is.
Worse yet, I feel so apathetic in this environment. I sit in front of the computer and feel like just going to bed. I go for a bike ride for 90 minutes, I come back and still feel the same. There’s no drive or energy. I have notes over half of a whiteboard. I nearly have a functional data model. I have months of ideas, concepts, directions—all scattered. Nothing concrete.
Worse yet, when I do feel like I have energy but am not interested in working on this project, I can’t find something else to do. I can’t think of some other programming project that I could be spending my time on, I’m already slugging through several books, I’ve played Uru to death, and I can’t think of any other strange Network protocol or system that I can learn (I’ve already learned bind, procmail, courier-imap, postfix, fetchmail, and mutt this summer).
If nothing changes, I’ll just be treading water until classes resume, and then the project has to go on the back burner again—right where I didn’t want it to be anymore.
I thing I understand how you feel about your project. I haven’t made any significant progress on my CPU since spring quarter. I know that I could build it and the design is complete, but I just can’t make myself go and buy the parts that I need to do it.