How do you deal with code/project burnout?

I've been refactoring and bugfixing my script for a week now. The project seems simple on the surface but the edge cases and methods to handle certain subsets of data are breaking it because handling them is vague and takes time to figure out and every day something is fixed and something else ends up as the issue preventing completion.

On the surface the idea seems sound so I'm also under pressure to get something "this easy" done.

Starting to feel some burnout on this.

Kind of had that feeling this past week. Got a major project dueat the end of the month, and a task I expected to be half a day ended up being six late nights of digging back into code to see why things weren’t falling into place.

What helps me in cases like that is taking a break from programming altogether and just flowcharting the process (or revising the charts I’ve hopefully already created). It allows me to get away from the bugs and refocus on how things work, why, and integrate new things I’ve picked up along the way. Beet part is that I’ve now got a roadmap for when I’ve recovered my energy to code again.