A completed border can offer structure while leaving the real difficulty untouched.

Starting with the edges gives you a frame, a sense of progress, and a boundary for everything that comes next. It also happens to be the easiest part, and finishing it can feel more like solving the problem than it really is. Many projects have a border like this: the visible, orderly work that surrounds the part nobody has cracked.

Look at whatever you are in the middle of and ask which piece is actually the hard one. Getting an hour of the difficult part done matters more than another satisfying pass at the edges.