This hurts. We had agreed on giving some written feedback after each dojo session, and I realize it's been ages (okay, just weeks) I didn't contibute in any way to this blog. What I find both frustrating and striking is, I did get some valuable insights at every session we had last month -- and I did mean to share them. Why stopping writing, then? I trace my silence back to the week of Feb. 14. We planned to have a dojo session that day, but my significant other reminded me few days before the session that it would fall on Valentine's day. I decided I had more important things to do than pondering over ruby code that coming evening. It turned out that most of the would-be attendees thought the same -- yes, all of us had forgotten that Feb. 14 is not any normal day... Coders, geeks, you know our kind. So eventually, we all decided to postpone the session to the following week.
Interestingly enough, someone mentionned on our mailing list that the postponing would be beneficial, since we would have more time to prepare our katas. Let's face it -- I've not been a really serious student during my engineering school time, and I already knew that in my case an extra week wouldn't actually change anything to my production capacity... I was actually wrong: it did change things. Although I have had some code to show since, my posting to the dojo blog fell to a null rate. I find it highly interesting that, as long as I am in the habit of doing something, I am more enclined to continue doing it while a slight perturbation in the rythm -- like feeling having nothing to write on a blog for a whole week -- makes it harder to pick it up again. After all, writing feedback about dojo sessions is something I had just felt natural a week before. Could it be that creative work has an inertia of its own, and that when it's stopped for whatever reason, one must deploy harder efforts to restart it than to just continue it?
I'm writing this post as an attempt to be back on (contribution) tracks. It is not the first time I stop a regular activity for a week, feeling it's just a one-time pause and finding myself six months later having done nothing related to this activity. This is the first time, though, that I have found a convenient way to bring me back to my former velocity -- that is, to acknowledge my stopping the activity through the activity itself.
We'll see how efficient this is.
Posted by Emmanuel at March 19, 2005 04:47 PM