Keep Plodding

This month has felt like a lot of hard work but very slow progress. I'm working on a new Pluralsight course, but not got nearly as far as I wanted to. I'm trying to fix some stubborn Windows 10 bugs in NAudio and still haven't finished. I'm trying to architect a resilient cloud-based solution, and realising how much I still have to learn.

I also discovered duolingo a couple of months ago and after breezing through the start of the French course due to vague recollections of what I learned back at school, progress is now painfully slow. It's a similar story with learning F#: I've got to grips with the basics, but I'm still not fluent. And despite my best intentions to blog regularly, I've missed most of this month.

It's easy to become frustrated when we feel like we're not progressing as fast as we want to. But I try to remind myself of a very simple productivity tip I heard a while back. It was simply this "keep plodding".

Most things worth achieving in life take a long time, whether its writing a book, or learning to play an instrument, or creating a great software product. So instead of being continually frustrated with yourself for not reaching your goals as fast as you would like, keep reminding yourself that as long as you keep making forward progress in the right direction, however slow, eventually over the course of a few years you'll be amazed at how far you've gone.

So spend another half hour practising the guitar, or solve another project Euler with F#, or write another few paragraphs for your book, or add one more function to your open source library. It may not feel like you've achieved very much, but every step in the right direction, however small, gets you closer to your goal.