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Comment by pcl | Hacker News Reader

> Have you ever come back to a project and been unsure of where to get started? If you had left off just one item sooner the day or week before, you'd already have a known starting point.

I can't find a cite for this right now, but I've heard this phrased as "park facing downhill." Towards the end of the day, I actively try to get myself into a position where I've put together the beginning of an idea and gotten some failing test cases written, or at least some non-compiling pseudocode into a buffer somewhere. This sets me up for success at the beginning of the next day -- I work right into a state of flow while tying together the loose ends from the day before.

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I did this Monday. I had meetings all morning so I spent three hours hogging the team whiteboard before I left for the day. It really works. I went and worked on some hobby writing I do and my brain worked on the problem in the background. The next day I had a new approach to try when I woke up.

'Park facing downhill'. I love it. I've read before that Hemingway used to leave his writing for the day in mid sentence, so when he sat down the next morning, he had somewhere concrete to start. I'm not sure how true the legend is, but it's a technique I use often with good results.

I have this pattern.

It's one of the (many) reasons I love TDD. Leave terminal with a failing test case. Come back the next day and I've got something obvious and trivial to code next. Bam. Straight back into that intermittent reward driven flow.

Agreed. I have to make a point of doing this with my fiction, such a leaving sentences half-finished, and I found that it does wonders for maintaining productivity. It keeps my mind from "closing the loop" and treating a project as "finished" prematurely.

Hemingway said that you should stop writing for the day when you know what the next thing is.

With this approach, you never have time to stop and clear your mind and look at the big picture, you are always stuck in the rut of what you were doing yesterday, which is what you were doing the day before, and on and on.

If I had the luxury of coding all day, I could see this as an issue. More often than not, however, I end up with meetings and whatnot peppered here and there throughout my day, so finding time to think about the larger picture isn't hard. What is hard (for me) is to kick-start myself in the morning, and a little help from my yesterday-self goes a long way.

That's simple to get around - you just schedule in a regular cadence for stepping back.

For example we do a little regroup after lunch, and have a weekly short 20m retrospective on Friday afternoons before stopping for the weekend.

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