Eat That Frog!
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There is a nice book with this title by the Author … Please read this short book; it will take hardly an hour and every minute of it is worth it. What the book teaches is very basic and applies to all walks of life. If you are presented with a task (any task), the book asks you to first analyze and find out the toughest part of the task and attack it first. It is that simple!
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If you always get into the habit of eating that Frog (that tough part of a task) then it becomes a habit and this habit brings great dividends in shortened time of execution of a task and far superior completion of the task as more time is spent on solving the difficult part of the task and less time is wasted on sundry side issues.
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When you look at a task at hand, you spend enough time on it to figure out what are the sub-tasks that need to get done and which ones are the difficult ones. In most tasks, this Frog will jump right out at you, if only you train your mind to look for it every time. Once this Frog is identified, then you can figure out how to get it done quickly; who to ask for help if you need help; or what resources you need to get it done.
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When you start off on any task, you are full of energy. By attacking the difficult part of the task, you use that energy well and do not dissipate on trivial things. When you are done with that, you feel relaxed, gain more energy and you can always get all the easy parts done without hurry and actually enjoy work.
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Example:
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Once someone had a task of creating a Wizard in Visual Studio to generate code if we point to a particular table in a database, using our framework and vform etc. What is the Frog in this? It is certainly not the forms that help you choose the database/table/fields etc as that is easy and well understood. The tough part is really merging the field specific info to an existing template file and saving the file as a new form. So, even if the database connection string/table etc is hard coded but we produced the final working form then the result is useful immediately. The Frog is done with and we can then enjoy the easy task of making a GUI for this code generator.
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| Instead if start off on the wrong end, then the results can be pretty bizarre! What happened in this case is very hilarious. The GUI was great; we could easily pick the database/table/fields. Since the Frog was not understood, the coding was done by inheriting a vform; creating an object; adding label/textbox objects to this vform object and everything worked in runtime, but one could never save this as code as it is an object!! | |
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Overview
"We will hit a home run with this product..." - Paul Rogers "I Especially admire their commitment into every aspect of implementation to their work and delve..".
