You can, but you can't

I don't deal with stress well. I like when I know what I'm doing and when things are working well, but struggle to overcome impasses.

I don't know if there's a known thing called "coder's block", but I have, in the past, pooh-poohed writer's block. There's always something to write, in my head, and if I have problems I just read other people's work and get ideas there. However, I've never written a proper story, so I don't think I can properly state that I know what writer's block is like.

On the other hand, I've been dealing with coder's block for the better part of a week.

One reason is that I'm really not excited about the CRUD aspects of this project. I thought I'd be able to plow through much more easily than I have, and while I now am happy with the framework I've developed, the knotty puzzles are pretty much behind me (for now?).

I spent some time cleaning up other things, and there is some value in those. I've learned quite a bit—from playing with Bootstrap to getting familiar with Sass, solidifying my knowledge of Javascript fundamentals, and so forth—and I've put some polish on things that don't really matter? I'm consolidating, but there's a line where you realize that your "polishing" bears a strong resemblance to "work avoidance".

So, you can spend time doing other things, but you can't, because the work you really need to be doing isn't going anywhere. All this stuff would need to have happened in time, but I can't say that it needed to happen now.

By contrast, though, I was spinning my wheels last week. I'm not so much anymore—I've gotten more actual useful work done on my project in two hours today than in any eight last week. Why is that, I wonder?