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Discussion on: How To Stop Procrastinating and Do Hard Things

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Mykezero • Edited

I actually use the same approach, however I procrastinate doing the 25 minutes of break down >.< . But if you consider the pain now, for writing down the approach for 25 minutes, with the pain later of getting lost, then it's well worth the time spent.

Edit:

My whole process would be:

  1. Gather as much information about the task as possible
  2. Remap those notes to something that makes sense to me.
  3. Take those notes and break them down into actionable steps:
  4. Start working on the core behavior (iterate fast here)

Remapped technical notes

New Feature: AddToCart

When user clicks the AddToCart button, the right side shopping cart pane should open and show the results

New feature requires Service A and Frontend A to change

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Actionable Steps

Feature: AddToCart

Backend: 

[ ] Create new API action to handle AddToCart
  [ ] Create controller action
  [ ] Find customer's existing shopping cart
  [ ] Perform the AddToCart action (SQL)
  [ ] Return a 200 OK

Frontend: 

[ ] Click the AddToCart button
[ ] Ensure the frontend calls the new AddToCart action
[ ] Ensure loaders / spinners appear
[ ] Add error handling
[ ] On success, populate the right side AddToCart pane with the cart details
[ ] On error, allow them to retry

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The whole process of writing it down leads to a better understanding of the requirements, which may prompt even further questions about the feature. Then, we can build the core features first, present those to stakeholders and they can give even more feedback.