Knowing When To Stop…

Knowing when to stop is an art-form in itself. This weekend has been spent doing very little which is work related. That is not to say that I have not been thinking about the project, but it certainly has not involved writing any of the report, drawing any design or banging out any code. I had found myself in the position of being completely unmotivated and agitated by any change of direction. It could be argued that I would be able to push things forward, which is itself a very difficult temptation to resist, but I decided that a couple of days away from the furnace would be good form. It is very easy to get stressed over the inability to work, but in reality these are days that simply weren’t there to be used in the first place. The art-form is assessing the cost/benefit in the face of a frowning and equally stressed management bod. However I have to say my supervisor seems quite relaxed about the project progress.

In terms of project progression, I had a mixture of frustration and joy on the coding front. The prototype is now fulfilling some functional requirements well and in a tidy manner. A few more bits and bobs and it’ll be usable in anger from day to day. The frustration was the amount of reworking required in a core component in order to achieve a very subtle, but very efficient piece of user interaction. The effort was justified as the user experience is a high priority.

In addition, the project report-writing is under way. I have an outline and a good idea of what is required. The survey has formed a large chunk of my project due to the time spent in producing it and getting it through the Ethics committee. There are a number of short cuts that could have been made in order to expedite progress, but the survey results would not have been fit for purpose. The amount of good data and the time taken to get it has given me the challenge of making brutally efficient use of the data and showing the time taken was justified. This involves being clear on all the conclusions drawn from the data which are relevant to the project and also publishing the results in a way that doesn’t breach Data Protection guidelines.

Anyhow, back to chilling out for a few hours more. As my folks consistently remind me: “Don’t work too hard”. Keep it quiet, but I might be following some advice.