You Cannot Tell Tired From Stuck

It is half past six.

You have been on this for five hours.

It is not a hard problem.

You know that.

You have solved three like it.

And still every path you take
ends in the same place,
and you are beginning to form
an opinion about yourself.

That opinion is not evidence.

You are reading a state
as though it were a property
of the work in front of you.

The bug is not harder
than it was at ten this morning.

You are worse at it
than you were at ten this morning.

From the inside
those two feel identical,
and that is the entire trap.

Nothing tells you which one you are in.

There is no alarm.

There is no ache.

There is only the work
appearing more difficult,
which is exactly how
a genuinely hard problem
would also appear.

Here is the proof,
and you already own it.

Think of the last time
you gave up at seven
and found it in fifteen minutes
the next morning.

That was not luck.

That was the same brain
on a better afternoon of its own.

It happens to everyone,
and everyone files it as a coincidence.

The cost is not only the lost hours.

It is what you decide while you are in it.

At the sixth hour
you will accept a workaround
you would have refused at noon.

You will copy the function
rather than understand
the one that already exists.

You will ship the change
that makes the symptom go away,
because somewhere around four
the goal quietly moved
from solving it
to being allowed to stand up.

Fatigue does not stop you working.

It lowers the standard
and leaves you working.

So pick the number in advance.

Two hours with no progress,
and you stop.

Not a break.

Stop.

Write down where you reached
and what you have ruled out.

You will feel like a quitter
for about eleven hours.

The morning has a way
of settling that argument.

– Serguey Asael Shinder