Spurious Logic

Monday Code

You should never get a hair cut on a Monday. Crappy cars are called "Monday Cars". And buying fish on an Monday means gone off fish.

Coding, and any professional work happens Monday to Friday (usually) 52 weeks a year. You're going to have some bad days in there and it's important to realise how to be productive and professional even though you can't even get started on the simplest of tasks. More importantly, you need to know how to get yourself back in the groove sooner rather than later and how to avoid causing further trouble for yourself.

Firstly, don't goof off and surf the web/continue your solitaire addiction. Apart for being just time wasters, they actually aren't restful and you're just as likely to come in the next day feeling crap. What you need to do is produce some tangible output, no matter how trivial or cruddy it seems. The point is not to produce something useful, but rather, when you come in the next day that you look back and think "Well I felt crap yesterday but I still managed to do XYZ". And you can work from there. Even if you end up throwing away all of the origional work.

Documentation is a good place to start. It's very important, doesn't get enough attention and doesn't require concentration to produce. (Note: it's unlikely you'll produce good documentation, so unless you double check it later and unless it ok, you should hide this festering pile of misinformation and deception away from uninformed minds just in case they read and remember it).

Secondly, unless there's a code red emergency (in which case you just need to up your game), don't try doing any serious coding (read- commiting to code base). You'll mess it up and have to spend the next day or two looking back on it going "WTF" and rewriting. "Monday code breaks Prod" is not a bad motto to have.

Of course if you're feeling like this every Monday (wednesday, friday... whatever) then you've got a problem with your job/career and you really need to look at if you're in the right business. For your own sake if nothing else. As someone smarter said, "Monday is a terrible way to spend one seventh of your life". It doesn't need to be so.