As a programmer, how much time do you spend churning?

Posted by Chinnery on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Chinnery
Published on 2009-01-13T05:07:18Z Indexed on 2010/05/30 23:02 UTC
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self-improvement

I recently went through a period of frustration, "churning" as I tried to set up my environment to work effectively on a task. By the time I broke through and started to make actual progress, I felt tired and kind of angry. (I'll admit: in this case, it took me several days of banging my head and ultimately starting from scratch to finally get around the problems.)

This experience made me wonder: When a roadblock happens to other programmers, how long do they churn before finally becoming productive and beginning what feels like actual work?

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