Neuroses and Programming

Are any of you guys neurotic? (Are all of you neurotic?)

I'm super neurotic. And I fear that, more than it helping me to program well, it gets in my way. I am obsessed with doing things the right way, and I begin to feel very uncomfortable if something I'm working on is becoming too complicated in the wrong way -- but somehow I'll be completely oblivious to how overblown my "clean and modular" solution ends up. But sometimes, the solution isn't obvious to me -- so if something is really stumping me, it eats my productivity and prevents me from feeling good about my work.

How do you deal with this? What general rules do you follow, and what do you do to put your mind at ease? For one thing, I'm thinking of getting a fish to put on my desk so that I can unload my stress on him.

Do the very simplest thing that could possibly work.

That attitude has always helped me, take it easy, premature optimization is evil. It's a way of life, don't build anything for the future, even if you know you will need it, when the future comes, it'll be much clearer what you need and more often what you don't need.

>>19
I'm convinced that this is a good way to begin. First make it run, then make it run better.