Ask HN: How do you decide on what to build/avoid decision paralysis?

I have a hundred ideas and a dozen half finished projects, I haven't shipped anything in so long.

Whenever I start working on something I get new ideas that seems better, and I get distracted.

Sometimes I'm also spending so much time trying to decide between multiple things to build that I end up doing nothing

How do you manage? Do you have any advice?

Over the past 3 years I launched maybe 2/3 very basic sites, I rarely complete anything actually complex and always jump to something new before I'm done

I've actually suffered form something similar for many years. I was recently talking to a mentor of mine complaining about this and he asked me "What is it that gives you paralysis and causes you to abandon projects?"

It really made me think about it. For me it was spending hours thinking "what if someone looks at my code and I'm not using the absolute best-fit design pattern because I didn't know about it. What if I used the wrong package or project structure..."

After I told him this, he said to me "You build things for people to use... only other developers are going to sweat the details. At the end of the day, let's say you do come up with a project that gets wings... who is going to be cutting the check? People who use the product and only care if it fits THEIR needs or a room full of developers who have nothing to show for anything other than a lot of flame posts?"

At the same time as this conversation was occurring, I was reading Seneca's "On the Shortness of Life." Pretty much a whole dialogue about getting off your a@# and just doing something.

Finally, take what you learned doing partial project A and see if you can apply those lessons to partial project B... it just may be that a few projects can be refactored from lessons and insights gained from other projects.

There’s the “pivot or persevere” concept from the “Lean Startup” book. Basically, if you’re stalled out, you step back, ask why, craft alternatives, compare their relative qualities, and decide which you’ll go pursue in the next time window. So basically just every now and then have a self convo of “how’s this actually going”, and set a deadline for when you’ll decide to persevere or pivot.

It’s worked for me loads of times, the important thing is that it both encourages and validates project momentum, which is probably the most important thing of all.

It comes down to persistence and originality. If the given idea is original and the value is worthy I will follow it at great expense.

For example I maintain a peer to peer application that used to use HTTP for all its traffic. I found an alternate transmission scheme that dramatically increased both performance and simplicity but it took me about a year to implement from scratch across all aspects of the application. This was a great effort and at first appeared incredibly fragile and broken, but once I really nailed down the concept it became far more durable that other more common transmission techniques.

I have been working on this application for just over three years and have almost no users. I keep going because now the application can do amazing things that everyone else cannot.

At least with me, externalizing the ideas, having literally any process helps focus so much.

Whenever I get a cool idea, big or small, I write it on a post-it and put it on a wall, then I can have faith that it is still there after I've finished what I'm doing. This is on a feature level, but some of them are ambitious multi-week things.

I think at least for me, the more I work the more ideas I have, and the more difficult it becomes to focus on finishing something that isn't very fun. If I can trust they still exist later, that isn't so much of an obstacle, but an asset, and I can finish drawing the owl in peace.

Having a battery of ideas ready to go also means sometimes I can often be extremely productive, and finish like 5-6 features in a few hours. Usually when I get stuck and end up procrastinating, it's because I don't know what to do next. The wall-of-ideas solves that.

It's like zero planning scrum. YMMV, but I've found it incredibly effective.