EE > Maintain your sense of Purpose

There's generally a reason you're eating your elephant: and if there's just one thing to take away from this note – always keep your purpose in mind along the way. It's easy to get distracted by noise while tackling large and seemingly intractable work and fall down unproductive rabbit holes.

The context in which you're working defines the constraints you deal with and the approaches you should take. For example:

• If you're only ramping up to do a quick bug fix on an old, mostly dead project: you should be laser focused on the desired behavior, the observed behavior and determining the safest, smallest change you can do to make them match. Simply papering over the issue without determining or root causing the true problem might actually be acceptable as a solution.
• On the other hand, if this is something you're going to spend a lot of time on—and possibly taking ownership of, you should build a deeper understanding of what's going on, how the system reached this state, and explore the “right” way to modify it.

Of course, nothing is really as black and white and there's a full spectrum of approaches you could take: potentially starting out with emergency “patch” fixes and follow up with real solutions once you understand the system deeply.

Ideally, you can set some reasonable goals to achieve in the near and short term: precise, tactical goals for your near future; and a general direction for what you broadly want to achieve over a larger period of time. These goals will be your primary compass as you explore.