Despite the title reading 'Week 7', this post comes two weeks after my last one. This is the 7th week of my university semester, and I'm finding it harder than usual to get into the swing of things. As a reminder, below in Figure 1 is my current timeline taken from my Week 5 post.
Figure 1. My timeline for the 4 weeks from Week 6, Own Work.
Over the break I did no prototyping and did passable work on my design report. At the start of the first week of the break I crashed and couldn't bring back my motivation. I have understood on my smaller scale that I'm not great at planning breaks in my study. Because of this, when I do take a break, my brain feels that it's involuntary and I 'should be working' which leaves me to exert a lot of mental energy just thinking about my project. As well as this, I believe that the hardships of learning a new coding language and being behind on my ambitious plans led me to be avoidant of the work. I then performed what I've learned to be 'cognitive dissonance' from psychology, where I devalued my work and valued other things to make myself feel better about not doing it. I now feel uncomfortable about my actions and about the stage that I'm at in the project. In the future I think that accounting for a break in my timeline and continuing slow progression (over no progression) in my project will help to avoid this situation.
To move forward from this I've made new plans for this week to hit my previous goals on a day-by-day basis. This will hopefully re-align my progress to my timeline and kickstart my motivation for the latter half of the semester. Below are the tasks that I have yet to do:
UX/UI Design Guideline
Brand Guideline Feedback
First Prototype Iteration
Presentation for stream partners next week
And below are my plans for this week:
Monday: Collect React tutorials. I intend to scour Youtube for full stack tutorials that get me the closest to my solution.
Tuesday: Brand Guideline Feedback, UX/UI Design Guideline. I intend to complete these in the time between my class and volunteering (1.5hr), and after dinner.
Wednesday: Finish a full stack development tutorial. This will be the hardest task depending on the video length. I want to start early, potentially using Pomodoro cycles to stay focused.
Thursday: Start presentation. I will get more information during class and I want to use the time during this day to do as much as I can.
Friday/Sat/Sun: Finish first prototype iteration and presentation. The prototype iteration involves changing the outcome from the tutorial to be as close to my solution as possible.
I think these plans are very achievable with comfortable levels of discipline, assuming that following a Youtube tutorial will be straightforward. I feel a lot better with these plans in place, and potentially should have been planning my weeks day-by-day previously to give me better micro-deadlines. I also think that the outcome of this week fits well with the 'Ensure you're on track' milestone that I set for this week at the start of the semester. It's like past me knew that I would've at least slightly derailed by now :')
I have changed the stage for this week to be the 'Design' stage, which next week being the 'Test and Refine' stage. If all goes well, I will still be on track for my milestone 'Working Prototype' set next week as well. Planned tasks can be seen below in Figure 2.
Figure 2. My new timeline for Week 7 and 8, Own Work.
It's mentioned in the plans that I need 'full stack development tutorials' for my process this week. I identified this as an issue after messing with the React app I created in Week 6, in that I had no clue how to move forward with the back-end of the project. These tutorials will hopefully give me better clarity on player-specific data, while also advancing my React learnings in other areas as well. It's incredibly useful knowledge to be able to build all levels of an app and may be handy for future projects.