on May 2, 2011
You often don’t realize you’ve gone too far until it’s too late.
It starts out as part of something else
You’re working on a project and something tangential strikes you as interesting. It’s not blocking or critical to figure out, so you make a mental note to look at it later on your own time. There’s a blog post in that!
You go back later and scribble down a few notes, maybe a little script: you’re going to look at that.
You open it up and start poking at things that night. It’s 8 PM and you look a few things up, write a few more scripts. It seems to make sense, but then you notice something is wrong. This doesn’t work exactly like you thought.
You manage to make it to bed. You take it out the next day and do more research.
It takes on a life of its own
Five days later, you’re on your seventh multi-page script. You’ve gone through countless MSDN links and related blogs. You still haven’t written a word of blog post, and at this point the topic is ten times bigger than when you started.
You’re just not quite there– there’s a better way to think about this issue. And if you’re going to be able to write anything about this anways, you’re going to have to completely refocus it. But you’re not done yet– you’re just Not Quite There.
And then you can’t sleep
It happens sometimes. I kind of love it, because I know it makes me learn things I’d never find otherwise. But it also makes me appreciate those times when things come together much more easily.