Every time I use a browser, my tab bar inevitably gets clogged. For me, “clogged” is when you can barely read the titles of each tab. At this point, it becomes necessary to close the browser completely, and launch it anew.
While I sometimes fear that this might cause me to forget something important, it’s rarely the case. When I have 20 tabs open, I’m usually only using the three or four tabs related to the task at hand. The other sixteen might be news articles, memes, random links that friends send to me, a YouTube video, and the like. I open them, consume the content, and don’t bother closing them. They’re the reason why my tab bar gets so messy. As for the couple important tabs, I’ve saved my information prior to shutting down the browser, so nothing is lost.
I believe that starting over is less harmful than continuing to fight against a tangled web of disorder. In fact, it usually helps my progress to go back to the starting line. As I write this blog post, I find myself deleting and revisiting entire paragraphs. After all, it makes no sense to patch bad writing with more writing.
“But Geoff,”, I often ask myself, “if you start over, you’ll lose a ton of progress that you’ve already made.” Admittedly, this is one of my fears that I have yet to overcome. If I’ve written 300 lines of code for an anagram finder, and I delete all 300 lines of code because of crappy organization, have I really lost 300 lines of code? Not at all! Code deleted on the screen does not equate to code deleted in the mind. After the Control + A Delete, I still remember the big ideas, the higher level details behind the messy code I wrote before. After starting over, however, I have a better sense of what went wrong logically and organizationally, and how to avoid these pitfalls. This is akin to learning from past failures, a process which I have experienced many times.
So can we really think of a project as a marathon, and starting over as tantamount to being teleported back to the starting line? Here I present an alternate view: A project is like an obstacle course. and starting over means that you’ve already run part of the course. You’ve actually made progress, by familiarizing yourself with that portion of the obstacle course. On your second attempt, you know what’s ahead. Maybe there’s a hidden shortcut past that giant rope ladder. Perhaps on your first run, you forgot to put on goggles for the swimming portion. Starting over means you’re more knowledgeable about the course, and that you can use that knowledge to get ahead of where you would be had you not restarted.
There are many blog posts here which, had I not started over, they would be a garbage pile of words. Many a time I’ve turned in an essay which required a fresh start two or three times. I wouldn’t have made the grade in my introductory programming class had I kept trudging on through organizational messes of code in my homework. Sometimes, it’s a necessity to restart, to have a fresh perspective.
The next time you’re stuck, I invite you to seriously consider starting over. Don’t brush it off as a ridiculous thought, but consider the further progress you could make if you went back to square one.
