I hold a cup of wisdom,
But there is nothing within.
My cup, she never overfloweth,
And ’tis I that moan- and groaneth.

— Kate Bush
“Sat In Your Lap”

Every once in a while, I become massively stuck, either at work or in life.

This stuck-ness is almost always rooted in a desire to be perfect combined with the self-loathing I feel towards not being even close to ever achieving perfection. When applied to projects, this results in procrastination. Thus, a simple task like DOCUMENT THE SETUP AT THE COLO SO MERE MORTALS CAN TROUBLESHOOT ISSUES THAT MAY COME UP OVER THE HOLIDAY becomes completely bogged down in an internal argument that goes a bit like this:

—I need to put this in our Instiki-based wiki, but I’d really like to put them in a neutral format in case we change our wiki to something like Confluence. After all, we’re talking about doing that soon. So…
—Should I use text files?
—Or perhaps a note taking system like Evernote? or Tomboy?
—Perhaps I should just use our wiki. Write it all in Textile.
—But Textile sucks for writing technical stuff. Perhaps Markdown would be better? Also, Markdown looks better when viewed as plain text.
—Do I need to write a script to convert this into Textile when I put it in the wiki?
—Oh, let’s just start writing in the wiki, FFS.
—No, maybe …

After a while of listening to my own internal monologue, even I want to stab my brain with a Q-Tip™.

Tell Me Something Good

Whenever this happens, I find myself going back and reading the so-called Self Improvement Patterns over on the venerable c2 wiki. The one pattern that keeps jumping out to me over and over is this one:

Sometimes you delay doing some AmeliorationPattern because you want to do it in the best way. In meantime you stand with an AntiPattern, a GreyPattern or NoPatternAtAll?.

Therefore, start doing it immediately, as well as you can now.

However, be sure that having a partial X isn’t worse than no X at all.

— c2 wiki
Any X Is Better Than None

Following this advice for the task at hand, it would be far better if I stop bitching and write the damn thing in Textile right into the wiki. The task is to convey the information, not spend a lot of time worrying about how pretty it is. Fit, finish and formatting can be tackled later, after the essential task at hand is done. And, should we need to convert to Confluence or some other markup, deal with it then, not now (see also YAGNI).

Not Uncommon, Really

Evidently I’m not the only one who suffers from this malady.

Rafe wrote about this same tendency to be perfect right out of the gate when it comes to learning a new programming language.

Anne Lamott told her writing classes to go ahead and write lots and lots of “shitty first drafts”, as you’re better off getting your ideas out of your head and onto the page no matter what they look like. Once you’ve gotten it all down on paper or on the screen then and only then can you can edit mercilessly, iterating until you are proud (or at least far less embarrassed) of the results. And maybe you won’t ever be completely satisfied, but at least you’ll have something tangible you can look at, something that you have created. This is a lot better than just having a pile of regrets to look back on.

tl;dr

In most cases, ANYTHING IS BETTER THAN NOTHING. Stop worrying and just do it.

Now.