I’m finding that I lack the ability to concentrate for long periods of time. I think concentration is a habit, one you can fall out of and working at BillMatrix for 7 years on top of my already bad habit of being distracted by shiny, jangly things has put a serious hurt on my ability to do one thing for a long period of time, especially if it is something I’m uncomfortable with.
Today has not been nearly as productive as yesterday. I started on a web site to catalog Texas historical markers today which has been a pet project on the back burner for a long time. I got a small framework for it but I immediately realized that I am a horrid graphic artist/web designer. I have been struggling most of the afternoon with CSS. My struggles are an equal amount of having zero experience with CSS and the aforementioned lack of concentration. I spent little to no time getting more familiar with Pylons instead finding myself constantly bogged down by the layout of the website. I’m pretty sure I’ll eventually get it to where it’s not ass-ugly but it’s certainly never going to be pretty.
I remember being in college many moons ago and difficult things (like calculus) always caused me to go to the golf course. That’s a habit I have to break if I’m ever going to get better at these things I don’t know. I can’t afford to take 3 weeks to learn Pylons. Whenever I’m writing code, if I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do, I can work for extended periods of time. But when it’s all a constant struggle, I’m easily distracted by whatever happens to be distracting at the time.
My goal tomorrow is to forget about how ugly the layout is right now and work hard on the plumbing of the site. By making good progress there, I can always chicken out and pay someone else to do the design.