I often think about how to be more productive and making good progress on projects. My progress on creating lessons for professorbeekums.com has not been as fast as I’d like. I started setting daily goals for myself to change that. An example would be finishing 5 lesson steps. This should have been relatively easy since I create outlines for them first. Since my lessons have 25-40 steps, that would equate to a lesson every 1-2 weeks. This is the kind of progress I was hoping to have.
That practice was only kept for a couple of days though. It sounds bad, but I think it was for the better. On the second day of using this policy, I realized that there was something structurally wrong with how I was building lesson 4. There was simply too much material in it and it progressed too quickly. That violated my requirement for slow paced lessons, which I consider essential for effective learning. The result was that I abandoned my goal for that day and worked on a redesign of the lesson instead.


While I did fail the goal I had set for myself, that short term goal would not have contributed as well to the long term goal of a curriculum that helps people learn how to code. Completing the short term goal of adding to a flawed lesson plan in the interest of “making progress” would have been illusory. I would have simply been wasting time to get a couple checkmarks on a checklist.


While I do want to make sure I make reasonable progress, it is important that I never lose sight of the bigger picture. My goal is to make the best lessons possible. Not the quickest lessons possible. I have no boss giving me deadlines here. I’m also under no pressure to make time to market. There are tons of online programming courses right now. There were plenty when I first started professorbeekums.com. What makes professorbeekums.com different is the quality of the lessons. That means taking my time developing the actual lesson plans.