Day 11: The Orange Glow
Thursday, July 24, 2025
It’s clear that while I may not have long stretches of hours to work and focus on a single coding milestone, small progress spread over multiple days adds up and is as beneficial as single long sessions. The last week of travel has presented a challenge to this experiment I’m running to finish my app on time. And today was the first day that I was able to squeeze in my experiment through multiple small sessions of real progress. One way I was able to accomplish this progress was by splitting the research and implementation into separate efforts.
A good chunk of my productivity time is dedicated to research. Researching new coding techniques, frameworks, or watching WWDC videos are usually my go-to when I’m sitting down in front of my computer. While I have been busy with travel and personal events, I’m taking a serious effort to use the small amount of time I have when I’m not in front of my computer to conduct this research. This, of course, is made possible by swapping out the time I spend endlessly scrolling on Instagram with dedicated time to watching a WWDC video or reading about a new coding technique that could help me. It takes a bit more effort than mindlessly scrolling social, and sometimes I still do set aside small chunks of time around 5-10 minutes to scroll without worry, but the rest of the time I’m focusing on fitting in the lengthy research part of my day.
Fitting in implementation time behind my computer, in Xcode, writing code is a bit trickier. It is something I’m still working on, but as of right now, my go-to is to just sit down whenever possible and write even a single function. Something small is usually enough to trigger my brain to get into a coding mindset, even if it is for 5 or 10 minutes. If time permits, that 5 or 10 minutes will grow to 30 or an hour in the best case. But even if it just is long enough to write a function or fix a small bug, it is progress no matter what.
These two small changes have helped me stay on track and finally start to see the end of this journey. For the first time in a long time, I’m finally close enough to start to see the orange glow of Mount Doom.