Calling it quits

Suffering from sunk cost biases.

Sunk cost bias is a psychological term that describes the tendency to continue pushing through your efforts regardless of the outcome. We do this because we have invested too much time, money and/or energy, and we want to see it through.

Due to my nature of wanting to finish everything that I've started, I tend to suffer from this a lot, it's only at the end of it all do I realise that I've wasted precious resources.

Time being the most important one of them.

I'm writing this post to remind myself to know when to walk from a project and be at peace with it.

The setting

For the past 2 weeks I took it upon myself to learn basic CRUD operations (being able to create, read, update and delete to a database). Since I'm a self-taught programmer and learn better by having my own projects, I decided to build a basic to-do list application to help me understand the entire process.

Everything was going well. I was understanding how to build a database, how to access it, I even designed the app on Figma to help me plan out what I wanted to build.

The issue

Everything was working correctly on my local machine. Nothing popped up in the console, no errors that I could see on my end, everything looked like it was working fine. It was only until I tried to deploy it online, I realised something was wrong with the application.

Every time I tried to access the app, I was welcomed with the words "500 | internal server error". Since I didn't have much to go off of, I went back to my code to figure out what was going on.

Since I'm still relatively new to programming, fixing bugs is one of my weak points. It's a skill in itself and one that I shouldn't overlook. My way of solving the issue was to basically go through every line of my code and see if I could spot any mistakes.

I Googled things, went back to my code, Googled again.

Nothing.

I updated lines that I thought were the culprits.

Nothing.

In total, I had spent about 3/4 hours figuring out where on earth the issue was coming from, and you know what I found out...nothing.

The realisation

In the end, I couldn't fix it. I found myself at a cross-road, I had to make the decision to either continue down this rabbit hole, or move on from this project.

Since I don't like to leave anything unfinished, my initial thought was to plough through this issue and try to solve the problem. Then I realised, I built this app to help me understand basic CRUD operations, that was the focus when I started this project. I had already achieved the main purpose, but somehow I got fixated on solving an issue that, when you look at it in terms of the bigger picture, didn't even matter.

Sure, it highlighted that I still need to work on my bug fixing skills, but I shouldn't have spent those hours on an issue that wasn't the main focus. I should have made a note of it, moved on, and be fine with walking away from it.

Those 3/4 hours could have been time spent on more important tasks, learning new concepts, or even spending time with my partner.

Know your priorities

I'm writing this post to remind myself to not lose focus on the bigger picture. Sure, it would be great to be able to see every project through till the end, but if it doesn't align with your priorities, you should be able to walk away from it.

Otherwise, you've wasted either your energy, money and most importantly your time.