I relate heavily to the author's dilemma. My projects span from math, to programming, to pinball repair, to amateur radio, to gardening, to mycology, to who knows what else. I personally enjoy the process of bike-shedding and endlessly exploring the solution space for a problem. That said, there is a point where you need to make hard decisions and button up projects.
As long as I don't care what project gets completed at what time, I've found a little trick to broadly move the needle. I jokingly call it "Sol's fast five" but the name is actually pretty on point.
I take a step back, look around me, and pick out the first five things I can reasonably achieve in less then a day prioritizing things where I have all the tools and materials at hand. These 5 things are never entire projects, the goal is to maximally decompose the projects until each action is as close to trivial as possible.
Once I have my list of 5 things I stop thinking about anything else and strictly work towards those 5 goals. There is a sense of relief in having reduced the scope and the tasks tend to be finished very quickly. Checking them off the list always feels good.
Once I have completed my 5 items I start a new list and pick out the next five items. This can feel like a huge reward.
I've used this system to great effect in the past few years.
> the goal is to maximally decompose the projects until each action is as close to trivial as possible
This is a big part of the GTD framework that is almost always dropped in the retelling but which I think is fundamental. The tasks should be broken down to the next physical thing you can do so you don't have to think to act.
But! Breaking down tasks to small pieces is a huge task by itself! Many people can't ever use that framework because well they cannot get themselves to that point. Is there any framework you know which could help applying this framework?
Thanks. I have heard a lot about GTD but never sat down and read it. I definitely want to read it one of these days but I also must say that after years of trying different productivity systems I find that the absolute simplest systems are the best for me.
Or, you could stop beating yourself up about it and reframe the whole activity as a creative release. Nobody else cares if you finish it, why should you? My neighbor died with a project car parked in his driveway. It had been there for years. Every so often he got out there and worked on it with his grandson. Who among us would call that time wasted? Why not dust off Project Foo on a Saturday afternoon, and just tinker with the fun parts?
Exactly. Unless you do it to earn money who gives a damn if you have a hundred draft projects?
Who except yourself that is.
Never finishing anything sucks, as it gives you the feeling that you.. well.. can't finish anything.
My tip is to embrace the fact that a big part of what we start does not need to be finished. I sometimes code a way just for the joy of doing it, that is okay. Not only is it okay, it is also necessary to try out things and play around. Playing is a very good way to learn. And if you give yourself that slack for some projects it is easier to go all strick and I need this done on others.
Other than that you need to ask yourself what blocks you from finishing things. E.g. a wise old audio mixing engineer once told me: a mix is never finished, you can always go back and optimize things, forever. Ultimately you need to say it is finished for it to be finished.
Software can be similar. Many junior programmers will adjust the scope of their software as they build it and wonder that it never goes anywhere. my tip is to select a problem you profit from being solved. Make a realistic scope what the goal is and do it, so you can go back to your fun project. Boom you just got a thing done.
I like endless projects. Building something the way I want to build it is fun. Why would I ever want that to stop?
I release updates to my various endless open source projects (such as https://www.farmhand.life/ and https://chitchatter.im/) regularly to the public. They are "complete" in the sense that they are fully-formed enough to be worth playing/using. But they're not complete. They will never be complete. I don't want them to be complete. I want to build them for the rest of my life, because building them is what I love to do.
In this context, I would say *finishing things* is the actual creative release. The "not finishing" is getting in the way of it.
(also, I highly doubtful that this is the author's one creative release, and and even more doubt he's coding up a project with his hypothetical grandson)
> Or, you could stop beating yourself up about it and reframe the whole activity as a creative release.
I think for some people this isn't better. If I feel like I'm not being productive in some capacity, I get depressed. It would happen frequently to me over the summers between school semesters, and it happens to me now by the end of a 1-week vacation. It might sound like a burnout path, but that's not what has historically lead me (personally) to burning out and I've been at this for like 10 years.
When I'm setting deadlines for myself, working fast to ship, making compromises due to time constraints I get depressed.
When I'm working on a project for years and it has not yet shipped, I get depressed.
Personally, I think the problem is not with each strategy, but with the context - time is money and money is time and I have pretty much none to spare.
I will admit that the longer I live, the more I realize this is one of the few things that actually matter.
<< Why not dust off Project Foo on a Saturday afternoon, and just tinker with the fun parts?
I think it is a good way to avoid burnout. I don't know if it is the same for everyone, but if something like that is planned for me, I get kinda bored fast and 9/10 abandon the project. When I am really into it, the plan doesn't matter, because it mostly just flows. I am trying to trick myself into the state of flow, but maybe I am simply trying too hard.
That's a good way of framing the project. Especially if what the article author says is true: which is that most of the energy comes from brainstorming and fantasizing about what the project could be.
The flip side is that you have to really buy into the activity as creative release -- and be OK not finishing when you start. For some people, their subconscious gets excited during the brainstorming phase most when they have a justified knowledge that they will likely finish the project. If these people start a project knowing they won't finish, it can take a lot away from the excitment of doing a project.
The article's author probably falls into the latter camp.
I agree with the conclusion, but using what other people care about as a standard for what you ought to care about is a path that leads straight to despair.
I meant that the obligation to finish is not externally imposed, so you don’t have to pursue completion out of a sense of duty. But I can see how you could read it the way you did, and it’s a fair point.
I used to find myself under the effects of this curse as well, so I would recommend the author look into why he embarks on such a thicket of unfinished side projects. In my own case, it boiled down to a mix of several imperfectly aligned factors:
1. Genuine intellectual interest
2. A desire to improve particular skills
3. A vague sense, acquired by osmosis, that industriously working on side projects during one's free time is what a Real Engineer does
Disentangling these motives and identifying a clear primary drive behind each project clears up the "hydra" feeling wonderfully, as most of the heads simply disappear once you realize that you never had a strong reason to pursue them in the first place. (3) in particular is often merely the self-castigating whisper of the internalized "should" rather than a valid reason to embark on a long and open-ended project.
If your inner motivation is satisfying intellectual interest or improving skills, you actually finished the real project behind the facade without a need for finishing the official project.
So, the mistake boils down to making up a fake official project as kind of a justification for satisfying your real needs. Maybe you would feel better if you are true to yourself and say "I do this to explore and learn, I don't actually ever intend to deliver a presentable product with this activity.".
This. I felt much better once I realized it and learned to 'delete' projects. These are like sketches an artist makes to practice for the real thing, which often never comes. But it is a satisfying learning experience.
Working backwards from the end result is a good practice to see where you want to take it. And the end result is not the deliverable itself, but how, for what purpose and by whom it is used. Will you want to charge money? Do you offer it for free to anyone? Will you take feedback? Does it solve a personal problem? If you can't answer these kind of questions, then maybe it really is the journey and you never intend on finishing a product anyway, which is fine.
> I used to find myself under the effects of this curse as well, so I would recommend the author look into why he embarks on such a thicket of unfinished side projects.
The why is easy: my brain is a damn traitor!
HN, Reddit, Wikipedia and (especially) tvtropes: a single click on any one of those sites, and 3 hours of fascinated clicking later I realise that I actually haven't got any work done, but now know a lot about spidermonkeys and the Magnificent Bastard character.
Strangely enough, instragram, tiktok, youtube and other social sites have never managed to hold my attention for more than a few minutes.
> Strangely enough, instragram, tiktok, youtube and other social sites have never managed to hold my attention for more than a few minutes.
Same for me. I guess the difference is that HN, Reddit, Wikipedia, and even TV Tropes are giving you some knowledge, occasionally even useful one; every now and then you'll stumble onto something that solves an immediate problem you have, or is otherwise transformative. That's variable ratio reinforcement right there, the basis of gambling addiction, made extra potent because the occasional win you get is actually real and lasting.
I’d like to add 4. The inertia and feel good sense of being in the flow when programming. The mind gets into a single track and wants to continue.
Fun but also exhausting.
So I stopped all that. I started learning Argentine Tango instead - lifelong project and an invitation to limitless mastery of multiple aspects of self and relationships.
F number 3. I feel we all give more than enough in our jobs.
this is really insightful, i am nearing ten years as SWE - i've always loved passion projects and learning outside of work. This has historically got me really far in my career. However I just started a new role as a team lead on k8s platform. I rushed out got a few NICs and started setting up a homelab to learn but havn't spent more than a few hours working on it in weeks.
for the first time in my life i'm starting to think that my hobbies outside work (and the majority of my identity) has very little to do with software.
i had never thought about how much my work was tied to my identity and it's extremely jarring.
Nearing 35 years and it started with side projects and will end with them. However, now I care more about getting high and hiking than I do about my side projects.
I actually shipped a product back in 2007 and supported it for years. Haven't shipped anything since but I am working on a scoped project that I hope to release across macOS, Windows, iOS and Android. Not looking forward to ironing out the cross-platform wrinkles as I'm so brutally lazy anymore.
I think it's worth differentiating between personal projects done to learn or just for interest, and those that are trying to accomplish something. If I do a project for myself to try things out and learn something I don't feel any pressure to finish the project. Once I've learned something or had some fun, who cares if it's "finished" or if anyone else will use it. On the other hand, sometimes I'll pick up something interesting that helps a friend or family member, or just that I need for myself, and there I'm pretty careful about scope. If I can't finish it in a couple weekends I'll look for the closest commercial solution unless it's a major once-in-a-decade passion project.
Definitely agree with this. Most of my personal projects are just to prove that something can be done. Once I know it's possible then the fun and interest is no longer there. I'm not trying to product a "finished" product or something that is polished enough for someone else to use.
I think this is an excellent point. For those projects that are needed by myself or others I prefer to look at the closest commercial solution first rather than last too see if I might spend more time than it's worth. Or to see if I might be able to sell my own solution to more than the target client (myself or others).
I suffer the same problem. It is all about conserving mental energy.
The way I see it, each person has 2 different mental power gears. A high power one, that drains you and makes you excited at same time. You need this for planning and thinking big or learning about a new tool.
And a Low power gear that allows you to fix bugs and create a small feature for a known tool. We mostly use this low power gear in our daily life, in meetings, while driving or preparing coffee. The high power gear is used sparingly, when we can't sleep at night because of an idea, when we try to learn something new. it is exciting, but draining and painful at the same time. We want to do it again only after forgetting the pain.
I think proscratination is because we use a high power gear too frequently, we are exhausted mentally, and it is too painful. so we say let's do it later. But what if you have a small task that does not need a lot of thinking to do? something not painful? Well this is easy. I can do it. The trick is, it needs to be easy. you should not waste 1 hour to set up your environment to be able to start. it has to be easy.
So to advance on a project, I need to make sure I always have low energy, easy tasks ready for me when i am not in my mental capacity to use my high power thinking.
It is as if I am 2 persons. a developer and an intern. you need to make sure there is enough easy tasks for the intern to work on. You have to accept this about youreself
Dont waste days planning and creating issues for youreself. This is too draining. you need to write the big plan only and make sure you have few tasks ready. not all of them defined from day 0. do a big planning every 2 to 3 weeks (looks similar to a sprint)
I really like this take! I've been doing software professionally for over thirty years, and really relate to all of the discussions here and the root post. I typically beat myself up about "why is this task taking me so long?! it should be easy by now!", etc. But it's likely because I typically take the "focus on the next hardest problem first, otherwise I'll only have all the hard problems to solve at the end" route, and have to use the high-power gear all the time.
What if personal projects are not meant to be finished? Journey and destination and all that? Perhaps for some it's more about the endless noodling about and whittling away bits and pieces, and a "project" is just a convenient excuse do do it?
One way to think about it is to ask yourself, is your personal project actually _playtime_? Playing is not goal oriented and therefore very relaxing. There is nothing wrong with that! I am happy to "play" programming and I learned a lot of techniques that I used years later - and then actually finishing it. Do not deny yourself playtime!
Agree completely. Reframe recreational programming as your favorite video game, and you’ll feel much more satisfied after a session that produces nothing, because that was never the point.
Agreed completely. Sometimes I've worked hard to put the finishing touches on side projects to make them usable by others and have been pleasantly surprised by the interest. But in most cases, even when I finish, almost no one cares.
And while finishing is an important lesson early on, just so you know how hard that "last 20%" is, it's grueling and not typically very informative or unique after that first couple times.
So I'm now squarely in the camp of do what I want and finish what I want on the side, with no guilt. If I enjoy the journey I call it good. Finishing is for the day job.
Exactly. I do side projects because they are fun. No pressure,
no expectations. Simply and pure knowledge gaining and programming… which I love.
I already have a boss asking me 9-5 when I will finish project X, so I don’t need that pressure when doing things by myself. Besides, some things are never meant to be finished (e.g., eating healthy, doing exercise, gaining knowledge, etc.)
> What if personal projects are not meant to be finished?
The key is deciding on 2 things before you start anything:
1. What is the goal?
2. How will I know it’s done?
With this approach you can start side projects purely to have fun for an afternoon or to learn a thing or to see how a technology or approach feels. Then you can drop it and move on. Goal achieved, thing learned, no need to keep going.
The worst projects in my experience come from unclear goals and fuzzy definitions of done. Those projects tend to drag on forever, burden your life, and fill up your days with busywork.
Note that it’s always okay to add additional goals to the same project once you’re done.
But because finishing is hard (and not fun) it’s also easy to make up reasons for why you don’t finish things, without scrutinizing the underlying motivation.
Sometimes i look back and say “I’m glad I moved on” but I think a lot of the time I also just wish the thing was done.
I always thought of the journey as the reward and that was very sustainable and I have picked up a diverse skillset.
I think one doesn't need to finish a project. One should be able finish milestones or reset milestones appropriately.
This matters to me personally to feel good about myself. A society favors art or progress. Depending on which effort you identify with finishing may not matter.
Without the "convenient excuse", the journey starts looking like pure procrastination; how do you enjoy it without the guilt about not doing more important work that leads to more important results?
What if it's a bit of both? Something dawned on me today when mulling on another related idea "systems vs goals", popularized by Scott Adams in "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big"[0]. It was a widely popular book at the time, even here on HN, but the core idea never worked for me. Nor even resonated.
Quoting from the book[1]:
"A goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don't sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, its a system. If you're waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it's a goal."
Boring, ain't it?
For me, the problem with project, systems, and enjoying journey over destination is that:
1) Projects don't motivate me for long; past initial excitement, I'm rarely able to muster enough motivation from the dream of finishing something (and enjoying the spoil) to move me past static friction.
2) "Journey over destination" - I mean, if I'm doing a project, I care about benefits and (my imagined) experiences given by whatever it is that I've built or completed. Journey is just a distraction at best; typically, it's a source of stress and many yaks to be shaved, most of them stinky and ugly. If anything, I get motivation from ways to shorten the journey.
3) Systems are even worse. If journey is just distracting me from the goal, systems are about putting the goal out of mind entirely, automating it away through habits, changes to environment, etc. While probably[2] effective, systems give me zero motivation - they're too arbitrary, generic.
It's a problem that, even in this formulation, I've been trying to solve for almost a decade now. Recently, I've started thinking about what actually motivates me about a project in an ongoing fashion; the insight I had today is that it's a combination of the "project" and "journey" factors:
- The base / fallback motivation is the goal - the benefit I'll get when I reach it. Often, the major one is that someone will be satisfied or impressed. Even more often, it's the relief of getting the consequences of not completing it of my mental threat board, and/or shutting up people who pester me about it. However, that alone is only able to keep the project on my mind; it's not enough to motivate sustained work.
- The immediate-term, ongoing motivation is the journey, or specifically the experience of proficiency, and all the interesting tangents I find along the way. It's a necessary condition for me to stay on the task, but I can't treat it as the main motivation itself - when I try, my mind evaluates the value of the activity as zero and pulls emergency brakes; after all, there are much easier ways to get immediate gratification, and there are more important things to do, so if I don't care about reaching the goal, what's the point of going for it in the first place?
Systems don't even enter the motivational equation here[3].
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that, in terms of motivation, the completion of a project and the journey to it are two different things entirely; treating them as alternatives is a category error.
Also my rambling here is saying that, at this moment, nothing for me has the right combination of "project" and "journey" factors - otherwise I'd be doing something else than writing HN comments.
(And yes, finishing projects completely is hard, because that last 20% of work contains the 80% of chores and annoying tangents that completely ruin the experience of the journey.)
- [2] - Hard to tell, I'm clinically unable to hold a simplest habit to save my life. Forget "it takes 30 days to ingrain a habit" - even after months or years of doing something "habitually", a smallest disturbance to the daily life is enough to undo all that work and get me back to square one.
- [4] - Exception: when I can reframe setting up a system as a kind of a project. Even then, it just makes it easier to build a system; it doesn't help maintaining it over time, which is the whole point of systems in the first place.
> Without the "convenient excuse", the journey starts looking like pure procrastination; how do you enjoy it without the guilt about not doing more important work that leads to more important results?
Procrastination is how I do all my best work. The secret is to set up some boring obligation, bonus points for triviality, and then not do it until the last minute. Meanwhile, work furiously at something else.
> how do you enjoy it without the guilt about not doing more important work that leads to more important results?
This is a serious suggestion: look into therapy to help you examine what and why you think and feel. For example, seeing some things as more important than others (including one's well being) and reacting to the situation with feelings of guilt are not a given.
Finishing is super important. Just focus on completing a version 0. Then, you can improve it if you feel like it. It doesn't have to be perfect, just finished under a reasonable timeframe.
Not finishing and endlessly moving from one project to another is bad because it prevents you from making meaningful progress. You end up spreading your efforts too thin and never see the results of your hard work. This can lead to a lack of closure, decreased motivation, and a cycle of unfinished projects that never reach their potential. Moreover, without finishing, you miss out on valuable feedback and the sense of accomplishment that comes from completing a project, which can be crucial for personal and professional growth.
I’ve mastered this. I’ve finished 12+ projects in the last year. 1 even made money.
How? My projects are tiny. If you’re building solo, you have to tackle projects reasonable for a solo dev.
I primarily build chrome extensions because the simplest ones can be finished in one night, and the hardest a month or two. It’s frontend only work, so you minimise the project surface area. I’ve only been building them for a year but I finish all of them.
And I focus on getting an MVP out, and only polish if I can be bothered.
Now that I’ve mastered the finish, I’m moving on to different projects:
- API only projects
- Scripts
- NextJS projects (simple backend)
- static pages
That's sound advice, but not foolproof, because of two things:
(1) what seems, at first, to be a tiny project can turn out to be a big project.
(2) with the right mindset, what seems at first to be a large project can turn into a tiny project.
And the confusing thing, when trying to reason about this and work more effectively, is that it isn't completely clear to what extent (1) and (2) aren't the same thing.
Readit News
As long as I don't care what project gets completed at what time, I've found a little trick to broadly move the needle. I jokingly call it "Sol's fast five" but the name is actually pretty on point.
I take a step back, look around me, and pick out the first five things I can reasonably achieve in less then a day prioritizing things where I have all the tools and materials at hand. These 5 things are never entire projects, the goal is to maximally decompose the projects until each action is as close to trivial as possible.
Once I have my list of 5 things I stop thinking about anything else and strictly work towards those 5 goals. There is a sense of relief in having reduced the scope and the tasks tend to be finished very quickly. Checking them off the list always feels good.
Once I have completed my 5 items I start a new list and pick out the next five items. This can feel like a huge reward.
I've used this system to great effect in the past few years.
This is a big part of the GTD framework that is almost always dropped in the retelling but which I think is fundamental. The tasks should be broken down to the next physical thing you can do so you don't have to think to act.
Also you have cool interests
Who except yourself that is.
Never finishing anything sucks, as it gives you the feeling that you.. well.. can't finish anything.
My tip is to embrace the fact that a big part of what we start does not need to be finished. I sometimes code a way just for the joy of doing it, that is okay. Not only is it okay, it is also necessary to try out things and play around. Playing is a very good way to learn. And if you give yourself that slack for some projects it is easier to go all strick and I need this done on others.
Other than that you need to ask yourself what blocks you from finishing things. E.g. a wise old audio mixing engineer once told me: a mix is never finished, you can always go back and optimize things, forever. Ultimately you need to say it is finished for it to be finished.
Software can be similar. Many junior programmers will adjust the scope of their software as they build it and wonder that it never goes anywhere. my tip is to select a problem you profit from being solved. Make a realistic scope what the goal is and do it, so you can go back to your fun project. Boom you just got a thing done.
I release updates to my various endless open source projects (such as https://www.farmhand.life/ and https://chitchatter.im/) regularly to the public. They are "complete" in the sense that they are fully-formed enough to be worth playing/using. But they're not complete. They will never be complete. I don't want them to be complete. I want to build them for the rest of my life, because building them is what I love to do.
(also, I highly doubtful that this is the author's one creative release, and and even more doubt he's coding up a project with his hypothetical grandson)
I think for some people this isn't better. If I feel like I'm not being productive in some capacity, I get depressed. It would happen frequently to me over the summers between school semesters, and it happens to me now by the end of a 1-week vacation. It might sound like a burnout path, but that's not what has historically lead me (personally) to burning out and I've been at this for like 10 years.
When I'm working on a project for years and it has not yet shipped, I get depressed.
Personally, I think the problem is not with each strategy, but with the context - time is money and money is time and I have pretty much none to spare.
I will admit that the longer I live, the more I realize this is one of the few things that actually matter.
<< Why not dust off Project Foo on a Saturday afternoon, and just tinker with the fun parts?
I think it is a good way to avoid burnout. I don't know if it is the same for everyone, but if something like that is planned for me, I get kinda bored fast and 9/10 abandon the project. When I am really into it, the plan doesn't matter, because it mostly just flows. I am trying to trick myself into the state of flow, but maybe I am simply trying too hard.
The flip side is that you have to really buy into the activity as creative release -- and be OK not finishing when you start. For some people, their subconscious gets excited during the brainstorming phase most when they have a justified knowledge that they will likely finish the project. If these people start a project knowing they won't finish, it can take a lot away from the excitment of doing a project.
The article's author probably falls into the latter camp.
1. Genuine intellectual interest
2. A desire to improve particular skills
3. A vague sense, acquired by osmosis, that industriously working on side projects during one's free time is what a Real Engineer does
Disentangling these motives and identifying a clear primary drive behind each project clears up the "hydra" feeling wonderfully, as most of the heads simply disappear once you realize that you never had a strong reason to pursue them in the first place. (3) in particular is often merely the self-castigating whisper of the internalized "should" rather than a valid reason to embark on a long and open-ended project.
So, the mistake boils down to making up a fake official project as kind of a justification for satisfying your real needs. Maybe you would feel better if you are true to yourself and say "I do this to explore and learn, I don't actually ever intend to deliver a presentable product with this activity.".
Working backwards from the end result is a good practice to see where you want to take it. And the end result is not the deliverable itself, but how, for what purpose and by whom it is used. Will you want to charge money? Do you offer it for free to anyone? Will you take feedback? Does it solve a personal problem? If you can't answer these kind of questions, then maybe it really is the journey and you never intend on finishing a product anyway, which is fine.
The why is easy: my brain is a damn traitor!
HN, Reddit, Wikipedia and (especially) tvtropes: a single click on any one of those sites, and 3 hours of fascinated clicking later I realise that I actually haven't got any work done, but now know a lot about spidermonkeys and the Magnificent Bastard character.
Strangely enough, instragram, tiktok, youtube and other social sites have never managed to hold my attention for more than a few minutes.
Same for me. I guess the difference is that HN, Reddit, Wikipedia, and even TV Tropes are giving you some knowledge, occasionally even useful one; every now and then you'll stumble onto something that solves an immediate problem you have, or is otherwise transformative. That's variable ratio reinforcement right there, the basis of gambling addiction, made extra potent because the occasional win you get is actually real and lasting.
Fun but also exhausting.
So I stopped all that. I started learning Argentine Tango instead - lifelong project and an invitation to limitless mastery of multiple aspects of self and relationships.
F number 3. I feel we all give more than enough in our jobs.
for the first time in my life i'm starting to think that my hobbies outside work (and the majority of my identity) has very little to do with software.
i had never thought about how much my work was tied to my identity and it's extremely jarring.
I actually shipped a product back in 2007 and supported it for years. Haven't shipped anything since but I am working on a scoped project that I hope to release across macOS, Windows, iOS and Android. Not looking forward to ironing out the cross-platform wrinkles as I'm so brutally lazy anymore.
I think proscratination is because we use a high power gear too frequently, we are exhausted mentally, and it is too painful. so we say let's do it later. But what if you have a small task that does not need a lot of thinking to do? something not painful? Well this is easy. I can do it. The trick is, it needs to be easy. you should not waste 1 hour to set up your environment to be able to start. it has to be easy.
So to advance on a project, I need to make sure I always have low energy, easy tasks ready for me when i am not in my mental capacity to use my high power thinking.
It is as if I am 2 persons. a developer and an intern. you need to make sure there is enough easy tasks for the intern to work on. You have to accept this about youreself
Dont waste days planning and creating issues for youreself. This is too draining. you need to write the big plan only and make sure you have few tasks ready. not all of them defined from day 0. do a big planning every 2 to 3 weeks (looks similar to a sprint)
It is all about conserving your mental energy
And while finishing is an important lesson early on, just so you know how hard that "last 20%" is, it's grueling and not typically very informative or unique after that first couple times.
So I'm now squarely in the camp of do what I want and finish what I want on the side, with no guilt. If I enjoy the journey I call it good. Finishing is for the day job.
I already have a boss asking me 9-5 when I will finish project X, so I don’t need that pressure when doing things by myself. Besides, some things are never meant to be finished (e.g., eating healthy, doing exercise, gaining knowledge, etc.)
The key is deciding on 2 things before you start anything:
With this approach you can start side projects purely to have fun for an afternoon or to learn a thing or to see how a technology or approach feels. Then you can drop it and move on. Goal achieved, thing learned, no need to keep going.The worst projects in my experience come from unclear goals and fuzzy definitions of done. Those projects tend to drag on forever, burden your life, and fill up your days with busywork.
Note that it’s always okay to add additional goals to the same project once you’re done.
Sometimes i look back and say “I’m glad I moved on” but I think a lot of the time I also just wish the thing was done.
I think one doesn't need to finish a project. One should be able finish milestones or reset milestones appropriately.
This matters to me personally to feel good about myself. A society favors art or progress. Depending on which effort you identify with finishing may not matter.
What if it's a bit of both? Something dawned on me today when mulling on another related idea "systems vs goals", popularized by Scott Adams in "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big"[0]. It was a widely popular book at the time, even here on HN, but the core idea never worked for me. Nor even resonated.
Quoting from the book[1]:
"A goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don't sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, its a system. If you're waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it's a goal."
Boring, ain't it?
For me, the problem with project, systems, and enjoying journey over destination is that:
1) Projects don't motivate me for long; past initial excitement, I'm rarely able to muster enough motivation from the dream of finishing something (and enjoying the spoil) to move me past static friction.
2) "Journey over destination" - I mean, if I'm doing a project, I care about benefits and (my imagined) experiences given by whatever it is that I've built or completed. Journey is just a distraction at best; typically, it's a source of stress and many yaks to be shaved, most of them stinky and ugly. If anything, I get motivation from ways to shorten the journey.
3) Systems are even worse. If journey is just distracting me from the goal, systems are about putting the goal out of mind entirely, automating it away through habits, changes to environment, etc. While probably[2] effective, systems give me zero motivation - they're too arbitrary, generic.
It's a problem that, even in this formulation, I've been trying to solve for almost a decade now. Recently, I've started thinking about what actually motivates me about a project in an ongoing fashion; the insight I had today is that it's a combination of the "project" and "journey" factors:
- The base / fallback motivation is the goal - the benefit I'll get when I reach it. Often, the major one is that someone will be satisfied or impressed. Even more often, it's the relief of getting the consequences of not completing it of my mental threat board, and/or shutting up people who pester me about it. However, that alone is only able to keep the project on my mind; it's not enough to motivate sustained work.
- The immediate-term, ongoing motivation is the journey, or specifically the experience of proficiency, and all the interesting tangents I find along the way. It's a necessary condition for me to stay on the task, but I can't treat it as the main motivation itself - when I try, my mind evaluates the value of the activity as zero and pulls emergency brakes; after all, there are much easier ways to get immediate gratification, and there are more important things to do, so if I don't care about reaching the goal, what's the point of going for it in the first place?
Systems don't even enter the motivational equation here[3].
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that, in terms of motivation, the completion of a project and the journey to it are two different things entirely; treating them as alternatives is a category error.
Also my rambling here is saying that, at this moment, nothing for me has the right combination of "project" and "journey" factors - otherwise I'd be doing something else than writing HN comments.
(And yes, finishing projects completely is hard, because that last 20% of work contains the 80% of chores and annoying tangents that completely ruin the experience of the journey.)
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- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Fail_at_Almost_Everythi...
- [1] - Via https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/973029-a-goal-is-a-specific...
- [2] - Hard to tell, I'm clinically unable to hold a simplest habit to save my life. Forget "it takes 30 days to ingrain a habit" - even after months or years of doing something "habitually", a smallest disturbance to the daily life is enough to undo all that work and get me back to square one.
- [4] - Exception: when I can reframe setting up a system as a kind of a project. Even then, it just makes it easier to build a system; it doesn't help maintaining it over time, which is the whole point of systems in the first place.
Procrastination is how I do all my best work. The secret is to set up some boring obligation, bonus points for triviality, and then not do it until the last minute. Meanwhile, work furiously at something else.
This is a serious suggestion: look into therapy to help you examine what and why you think and feel. For example, seeing some things as more important than others (including one's well being) and reacting to the situation with feelings of guilt are not a given.
Not finishing and endlessly moving from one project to another is bad because it prevents you from making meaningful progress. You end up spreading your efforts too thin and never see the results of your hard work. This can lead to a lack of closure, decreased motivation, and a cycle of unfinished projects that never reach their potential. Moreover, without finishing, you miss out on valuable feedback and the sense of accomplishment that comes from completing a project, which can be crucial for personal and professional growth.
Why?
> You end up spreading your efforts too thin and never see the results of your hard work.
What if the result of my hard work is the lessons I have learned along the way? Or the skills I picked up? Or the time spent entertained?
How? My projects are tiny. If you’re building solo, you have to tackle projects reasonable for a solo dev.
I primarily build chrome extensions because the simplest ones can be finished in one night, and the hardest a month or two. It’s frontend only work, so you minimise the project surface area. I’ve only been building them for a year but I finish all of them.
And I focus on getting an MVP out, and only polish if I can be bothered.
Now that I’ve mastered the finish, I’m moving on to different projects:
- API only projects - Scripts - NextJS projects (simple backend) - static pages
(1) what seems, at first, to be a tiny project can turn out to be a big project.
(2) with the right mindset, what seems at first to be a large project can turn into a tiny project.
And the confusing thing, when trying to reason about this and work more effectively, is that it isn't completely clear to what extent (1) and (2) aren't the same thing.
2) I’m yet to run into this
- Ad blocker/s
- Site CSS overrides
- Salary revealer for job sites
- API blocker
- Extended devtools
- AI powered UI design feedback tool [0]
… and many more
[0] - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ui-copilot/hgaldpfd...