Hi. This is a brief manual curated by me on ways to get past the procrastination phase in a project. The insights mentioned here are a gathering of my reflection of our semester 5 Web Development paper. Please note this is not an exhaustive list and is a product of my limited experience.

"You don't need to know 'everything' in order to be able to start."

What can be termed as one of my big regrets from semester 5, is that I should've started working on the website project much earlier. Instead, I kept telling myself and everyone around me, that I had to catch up on missed classes, and finish 'knowing' things like all the basic commands in order to be able to start.

It was a fail and I found myself being unable to code for a simple web page despite having read quite a bit.

The real stuff started happening after I jumped right into it i.e. got on codepen, copied codes and started meddling with it.

I personally don't think that everyone out there, who is making websites ( consider amateurs and intermediates) know 'everything' about coding. Probably the same with video makers. It isn't possible that everyone who earns money through their videos knows everything about all the video editing software that exists in the world right? You can still do a decent job without having a PhD on the topic.

Later when I began again, the first few hours were horrible and scary and made me want to quit. But then I reached a point where I was able to identify the basics that I couldn't skip learning. Things began to slowly get easier after that.

"When something has been pushed for more than 4-5 weeks, know that it is probably never happening."

And that it might not be as important as you think it is.

There were a couple of classes I missed during the initial part of the semester whose recordings were available on MS Teams. I kept procrastinating this task of watching them but also believed that I would not be on the same page as the rest of the class without catching up.

The more I procrastinated, the more I started being afraid of the possibility of me being unable to figure it out. There were multiple times in class where I felt lost, horrified and intimidated by the seemingly vaste information and the catching-up that I had to do.

Moral of the story : Stop aiming to follow the linear path. If you miss a class, you don't need to get stuck on it and wait till you go back and catch up. You can still figure it out as you move ahead.

"Working with partners can make the project seem less intimidating."

Due to how scary and vast the work looked, I would've procrastinated working on the website till it was 20 days for the submission date, had the thought of my project partner failing because of me, not occurred.

There were multiple instances where one of us got frustrated due to a code not working and start thinking of settling for a simpler version of the design. But right then the other member automatically offers to takes over. This sort of constantly got the project moving which in turn made us want to come back and continue trying again.

But it doesn't always work out well. With Lipsy—my initial work buddy, things went ugly. It was my mistake of not catching up with the class on time, but the lack of communication with her about how I was stuck, made the whole thing worse. So much that I found myself avoiding Lipsy in college once.

A similar feeling was expressed by another classmate when she said that her buddy ( probably unintentionally) made her feel like she was slow in getting hang of things and figuring out stuff. So much that the focus for her shifted from getting the code right to making sure that her buddy doesn't think that she isn't working enough.

Arguments.

"Am I insisting on this point because I genuinely think doing it this way is the best ? or am I trying to be assertive this time just because I am insecure that I'm probably not being taken seriously n this team?

Although there was no particular incident which made me question myself that way, this is a realisation that I have come to which I think needs to kept in mind during any clash of opinions.

There was one time when my project partner came up with a list of 'things to fix in the code'. It bothered me a lot because just the previous evening I had stayed up all night and made my own list of changes on a piece of paper. Later when I found a way to bring up the topic, I told her about how she ignoring the 'fix list' that I created, made me feel like she thought my work was shit. She replied, "Ohmygodd I'm sorry I didn't even know you made one!"

Now that I think about it, I realise that I probably should've specified that — 'Hey this is a list of all fixings to be done, continue adding things to this list' rather than assume that she'll know.

Next morning I see her inputs being written on the paper checklist that I made :)

Being Lost in class

I look back at the number of times I texted our Web-Dev professor — about how I'm supremely behind class, just so that he doesn't get shocked when he figures out how clueless I am.

In the initial part of the semester I sometimes considered not attending the class because I hadn't caught up with what was taught the previous day. I thought that bunking was probably better than sitting in class and being lost, or worse - the professor catching your secret and this making the professor think that the whole class had not understood anything and that we were all just pretending.

What I came to know later?

1. That everyone in class were on different levels of understanding what was happening on the screen.
2. That not everyone had all the HTML elements and rules memorized, instead they just googled what they didn't know on the side and moved on.
3. That there were many people sitting in class and participating despite not having attended the previous class or having figured everything out perfectly.

Don't miss class - The least you can do is show up and try to follow.