This one is coming from my own recent experience. I am working on a remake of one of my popular apps – Time Clock Helper. I have some of the basic parts working, but I wanted to add the ability to add multiple punches. The original app could only use four punches at a time with an option to turn off either pair of them. There were some issues with SwiftUI and deleting the punches, but I managed to come up with a work around for that.

The problem that slowed me down over the last few days – to the point that I didn’t really want to look at it until I had an answer was how to handle deleting punches. I originally allowed them to delete any punches they wanted, but that caused some minor issues with my work around for SwiftUI. So, to avoid that issue, I made the first and last punch permanent. That worked well and the user could add and remove punches at will.

The only problem is that it didn’t fully make sense. Why were the punches you added always in the middle and not simply at the end? I struggled with this idea. I liked that idea that the initial punch in, and the final punch out would always be kept in place. But, would that make sense to someone other than myself? I wasn’t so sure about that.

But, today I decided to just leave that problem alone for now and move onto other parts of the app. As I was plugging away, it suddenly became obvious. It was so obvious that I am cringing as I write this – get rid of “Add Punch” and change it to “Add Break.” Boom. Problem solved. A few seconds of coding later I fixed an issue that had been bothering me for days.

If I had simply been able to ignore the small issue and move on a few days ago, I probably would have found the solution days ago and not wasted so much time. Oddly, I thought of this topic earlier today when I didn’t yet have a solution. I was simply going to write about how I ignored the small problems and was able to make progress on my program in spite of the issue. But, I guess I proved my own point in a better way that I would have expected.