One of the tenets of XP is that you work at a sustainable pace. Mostly that means that you don’t work such long hours that your brain turns to mush and you start churning out bad code, however there is more too it.

Working at a sustainable pace also means knowing when to take a break from a task. After weeks of slogging away at replacing this 3rd party library – constantly making progress and getting small wins from each acceptance test we got to pass – this afternoon both Doug and I seemed to have stopped caring as much as we should, so we took the afternoon off of that project and went and caught up on the other things we needed to do. When we return to working on it we should be refreshed and able to approach the problems with a more open, creative mind and thus write better code.

That’s the theory anyway, we’ll see how it pans out.