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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

As someone who studied and worked at art school let me assure you, that this is quite normal.

Some people just are better at changing their doing-hat to the editing- or evaluating-hat in a rapid fashion than others. Being (and staying) conscious about this is already 80% of the solution. However the real reality check is always when you have a room full of people look at ghe thing you made.

If it helps, try to make rituals around the reflection part. Be it something simple as putting your hands into your pockets, making a cup of tea or showing it to a friend. Everything that gets you away, everything that makes you explain it to aomeone else etc. will help.

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For me, it really helps writing the documentation. I usually come back and change a feature while writing. I dislike explaining things to people, so I change it as much as possible so it becomes as easy and quick to explain. I call it DDD. Documentation Driven Development.

When possible, I practice full DocDD (DDD is taken). I write a short documentation before the code, write the code, change the documentation to reflect the code, and then change the code to improve the documentation.

You may realise this, but DDD usually refers to 'Domain Driven Development'.

> Some people just are better at changing their doing-hat to the editing- or evaluating-hat in a rapid fashion than others

I only recently realised that, for me, "dev mode" and "product mode" are entirely distinct. I'd been trying to mush them together in a haphazard way, with haphazard results.

In my opinion, this is a really important insight. It's analogous to the De Bono thinking hats, divergent/convergent thinking, etc – distinct phases of cognition that can't happen simultaneously.

> If it helps, try to make rituals around the reflection part.

Great idea! Is this something you learned in art school?

In my experience, every art student seems to incredible at "shipping". I've always been jealous. Way better than most CS or business grads. I guess it's a core part of the degree?

There's the famous study about 2 groups of pottery class, one group was asked to make one perfect vase, the other to make as many vases as possible...

Guess which one ended up with just not more vases but much better quality ones...

Focused/directed practice makes perfect, each iteration your brain is strengthening the pathways associated to that activity, making it easier for you to add more nuance/attention to detail at each iteration...

One can always keep practising without focusing in improving, which isn't as useful...

Strong agree, for me the idea of showing something to a colleague immediately makes me able to view it from a different lens. Regular design critiques are really valuable, even if the person you are showing it too isn't an expert, because it gets you into a different mode of thinking, you can't do mental shortcuts when you are actually explaining things so it forces you to be concrete.

They idea of turning it into a ritual is awesome. I’m definitely going to try that because it’s something I’ve struggled with in the past. I find building things into habits is the only way to maintain them in the long term.

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