Three ways to keep your work focused
Computational biology moves fast in comparison with traditional biology. All it takes is a few lines of code to produce results. Contrast this with the wet lab, where every step usually requires a full working day, or more. Difficulties with direction, often arise from having too much data, rather than not enough.
As such, in bioinformatics, it's important to keep focused on what you are trying to achieve. Do you need to add the extra search feature to your tool? What does it add? Can the question be answered with what you've built already? I threw away 10,000 words from my masters thesis because I lost direction. Here's three practical ideas that I use to keep focused.
Talk about your work Talk to someone about what you're up to. Go for a coffee and have a chat about it. Speaking about what you're working on gives you a fresh perspective. You have to vocalise all the jumbled ideas in your head into a coherent trail of thought. This will immediately tell you where the weak points are, even before the listener has a chance to respond. Whoever you're talking to will ask questions, point out obvious flaws, and tell which bits are exciting. All which will help you focus on which areas you should be working on.
Write about your work Keep a log describing what you've been doing. Just a few sentences each day. Writing down what you've been doing, like speaking out loud, makes you think in a different perspective. If you have a supervisor, write small reports on what you've done. This can be useful to get feedback if they're usually too busy to see you.
Review your work Every so often I look at my log and ideas book. What direction is my work taking me? What's changed since last week? Have I taken a different route to what I originally intended? Am I still heading in the right direction? Occasionally I realise I've gotten side tracked into something which is not relevant. Usually then it's a good time to go back and re-evaluate what my long term goals are. For example what is the title of the paper I'm going to write.