When I'm developing, I find that I tend to be solidly focused but the scale of what I'm focused on switches back and forth.
The usual pattern is that I start out with some large scale goal in mind that I work steadily towards, often with little attention to the side issues. Sooner or later things are complete enough that the large scale goal is satisfied but the focus is still there unless I've burned out on the whole endeavour. With nothing big to tackle, I flip over to working away on the smaller things that I ignored before; their imperfections are big enough to annoy me, so I polish them.
The problem is that I can easily wind up gnawing and gnawing away on ever smaller things in what is not really a sensible use of time. I should just declare the whole thing good enough and move on, but my focus won't let me let go, so until I can find another large scale goal to chase I wind up polishing ever smaller bits that have ever more dubious alleged imperfections. This is especially bad in documentation, where I can repeatedly second-guess and water down perfectly good first pass writing.
(Writing this comment pretty much went that way: bang out the initial idea, then obsessively rewrite bits well past when I should have clicked 'submit' and gone on.)
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The usual pattern is that I start out with some large scale goal in mind that I work steadily towards, often with little attention to the side issues. Sooner or later things are complete enough that the large scale goal is satisfied but the focus is still there unless I've burned out on the whole endeavour. With nothing big to tackle, I flip over to working away on the smaller things that I ignored before; their imperfections are big enough to annoy me, so I polish them.
The problem is that I can easily wind up gnawing and gnawing away on ever smaller things in what is not really a sensible use of time. I should just declare the whole thing good enough and move on, but my focus won't let me let go, so until I can find another large scale goal to chase I wind up polishing ever smaller bits that have ever more dubious alleged imperfections. This is especially bad in documentation, where I can repeatedly second-guess and water down perfectly good first pass writing.
(Writing this comment pretty much went that way: bang out the initial idea, then obsessively rewrite bits well past when I should have clicked 'submit' and gone on.)