Slow Progress Part1 : Wrong Expectations and Failure Management.

Where Time Goes

It's said that mostly we do 80% of progress in the 20% of the time spent on a project and 20% of the remaining progress in 80% of the overall time spent.

It is indeed a very realistic estimation of what really happens at least in my experience.

An optimal solution could be to skip that bad 20% of things, but normally we spent more time on them as we wrongly get those tasks too much importance, so we generally don't really like to cut that part of the project.

What Comes First

For learning purpose it could be good to exit your comfort zone and do first things that challenge you the most, but to gain the right momentum it is better to start with things you just know you are good at.

Challenges are what make you feel great when you get through them, but they can also bring you down when they reveal to be harder than what you had expected.

Hard To Guess

Expectations are generally what really bring us down as for everyone on this earth it is very hard to do a proper estimation about how hard a task will be and how much time it will require. Expecially when you are scheduling your own time.

Autofail Mode.

How many times we built some safe net to let us  fail without too much remorse.
How many times we set out failures in advance and just prepare exuses for them.
Productivity is always mined by bad habits feed by excuses.
Bad expectations, make we doubt about ourself and our skills and make us more prone to build further excuses and so more bad habits.

I Believe In Good Lies

Mostly we need excuses to perform bad things,but we also need them quite often to mantein a good and productive behavior, maybe built cheating our brain to believe some good lies.
Some of our beliefs may indeed have a desirable placebo effect.

I Will Start It Next Monday

Sometime could be good to understimate a task and set a tight deadline as it makes you don't lose your time as people generally tend to start taking things seriously just when the deadline is next or in the missed milestone crunch time where they go pratically crazy.

Failure Master

Said this probably the greatest thing one can learn from the life is to manage own failures.
To understand the lesson behind a failure and that the failure was just another step towards our goals.

Teamwork could sometime break a bit some of these bad patterns or at least could dampen the personal self destructive "Autofail Mode" behaviour.