How Much Difference Does Preparation Make?
I remember a story once about a father who was trying to help his daughter improve her falling High School grades. For a critical test, he worked with her and forced her to study much longer than usual. She grew frustrated, feeling she already KNEW all this stuff, and didn't see the point of further preparation.

The day of the test came, and that night she reported to her father that she'd told him so. All that time spent preparing was wasted, she announced, feeling vindicated. The test had been EASY.

I've noticed in the last several weeks some dramatic differences in my productivity in my indie game dev. Some nights it's easy. Other nights, I get an awful lot of web-surfing done. Some of the difference is undoubtably associated with how fatigued I am from working on games all day long for the day job. Sometimes it's hard to jump right back into it. Other nights - I'm not so sure. I'm making an analysis of my personal productivity the last days makes me wonder if I couldn't take some tips from the girl's father in the story about preparation and planning.

I've been juggling three projects the last few nights (Apocalypse Cow, some website changes and blogging, and the Next Game). For two of them, I had a nice list made up of tasks. I'd broken the tasks down into small enough chunks that I could pick out the task, could easily figure out how to get started, knew what it would take to finish, and in spite of some major setbacks (including a lock-up when I hadn't saved in a LONG TIME, shame on me), I managed to get stuff done more quickly than anticipated. Go me. Which gave me time to work on the third project - the new game - an unexpected windfall.

I was thrilled! Since it's in such early stages - still being designed with some prototype work - it's a lot of fun. I don't usually have any time to work on it at all, so it felt like a reward.

And I got almost nothing done on it.

I kinda stared at the screen, zoned out, got distracted by other things that needed to get done that I had a better handle on, and of course Teh Interweb Shinies. I had no tasklist - but did I need that? I mean, there's TONS to do, I could just take my pick!

Apparently, I chose none of the above. The hour I dedicated to doing some work on it was almost completely wasted. Sure, I got stuff done - including some needed tasks. But nothing to make progress on the game.

Granted, it was late, and I was getting tired. It was a whole writer's block type of situation. But I think there was more to it than just that. I suspect that if I'd taken ten minutes out of the hour-plus I'd given myself and just focused on what I wanted to achieve, and then committed to it, I'd be further along on that project this morning than I was yesterday.

I'm not a big planner, and I have seen projects crippled by overplanning in the past. But underplanning can be even worse.

What I'm coming to realize is that my brain runs in two different modes. Mode One is the design / plan / architect / manage mode. Mode two, probably the stronger of the two, is the furious-getting-things-done mode. I have trouble recognizing that these are two discrete states that I have to deliberately transition between. I keep thinking that I should be able to plan and organize and figure out the steps to accomplish the task when I'm in mode two - as I go along - and my brain just doesn't seem to want to operate that way. Thus the "comment first" methodology works so well for me.

Obviously, I need to make some changes in my work flow habits to take advantage of this. Because I really, REALLY need to get Apocalypse Cow out the door and make some serious progress on the next game this summer.

For the idly curious as what I did manage to get done, I created some scripts to help automate changes to the main website, finally added a link page (contact me if you run a gaming site and want to swap links), modified navigation on the site a little bit, worked on an upcoming blog post, modeled, textured, and changed the behavior of the rescuees in Apocalypse Cow, and worked on a ... uh, let's just say Barking Cows.

Labels: productivity

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:43 AM (Permalink)