I recently went through a period of frustration, "churning" as I tried to set up my environment to work effectively on a task. By the time I broke through and started to make actual progress, I felt tired and kind of angry. (I'll admit: in this case, it took me several days of banging my head and ultimately starting from scratch to finally get around the problems.) This experience made me wonder: When a roadblock happens to other programmers, how long do they churn before finally becoming productive and beginning what feels like actual work?