The most miserable being in the world is a lost dog. Number two is a programmer who got legacy. But not the legacy of rich childless dead uncle you never know. No, I mean legacy code of the guy who worked before you. You are smart, you use agile, test driven development, continuous integration and other cool things... But it doesn’t matter anymore. Because the guy preferred to apply hot fixes on production using Vim and SSH. The repository keeps outdated broken code. The live code accidentally crashes, but nothing useful could be found in the logs. And you have to deal with it. My condolences, you got legacy.

And the most frustrating thing is that you cannot start from scratch, because the product is alive, too much time and money had been invested, you know, you are smart, fix it, please. And then you get paralysis. You have to do something, but you cannot force yourself to start coding. You take a cup of coffee, check your inbox, check for updates on Redit, Facebook, Twitter, then check your inbox again, then another cup of coffee, then lunchtime, then updates... and that never ends. But what the heck? You can write code all day long, and all night long. You love it. What happens here? Why you cannot just start?

The answer is chaos. You don’t know what to do. And you must have a plan.

1. Explain to your family, that the bad mood you got is not because of them. It’s really important.
2. Explain to your customer, that you are going to fix stuff, but some working things might accidentally be broken. It’s really important too. The paralysis you got includes the fear to break something, because of lack of understanding how things work together.
3. Create new repository and place the code from production into it. You really don’t need to find out, which hot fixes had been applied on the live code and why code in the current repository is outdated and broken. Just throw it away.
4. Make working development environment. It shall give you some inside of how the code works and will help to eliminate the fear.
5. Make test plan. Some day you will make automated tests. But for now, simple checklist would be enough. It will help you to control process. More control—less fear.
6. Setup staging environment and continuous integration. No comments, you must have it.

At the moment you make these six steps, you will have understanding of what you have to do and how you have to do it. The paralysis will go away, and the confidence will get back. Go ahead, and may the force be with you.