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Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?

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Re: Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?

#221

Post by trevorrr »

ryeguy_24 wrote: post #34

I’m just like you. I stumbled upon a book called Refuse to Choose and it’s about a personality type (that is definitely not ADHD) that happens to want to do a lot of things (sometimes in parallel or in sequence). It was very comforting to know others struggle with this and this book helps you to be ok with it. I wouldn’t say it “cured” me but I think about it differently now and use it more to my advantage. Worth a r…

I can recommend this book, too. Most helpful for me was the concept of the scanner personality.

Sometimes it just seems as you are not finishing things, for me, it's more like I'm letting some things rest for quite a long time but pick them up again later. I'm just craving variety to get fresh input for all the other things and I see this as a skill. Today I am glad that I haven't unlearned to play around.

It has its benefits, tons of it, I was only unhappy with it as long as I've let others stigmatize me as lazy or undisciplined for how I am.

Re: Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?

#223

Post by cityzen »

I am fortunate that I can think of ideas pretty quickly but I get overwhelmed with what tech to use. If you can just standardize on a platform you know, set your ego aside and use that. You can always iterate a working project but you can't do anything with unfinished work.

If you want to learn new, shiny tech, do small proof of concept projects and consider if they bring any value to what you've already built with what you already know.

Aside from that... you just have to do the work!

A book I've really enjoyed for my motivation across not only work and side project but also life in general is The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday: https://www.amazon.com/Obstacle-Way-Timeless-Turning-Triumph...

Re: Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?

#224

Post by vtail »

What works for me is enjoying the process, not the end result, and making small incremental progress. I started blogging recently - just little pieces of code or analysis here and there - and found that a sense of making progress strongly motivates me to tackle harder problems, while sharing my progress along the way.

Re: Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?

#225

Post by qaid »

I was in your situation a few years ago.

I “found my way out” when I created a project that I really cared about. It scratched multiple itches and I was constantly finding new ways to improve the application. It got the the point where I had to create a backlog for improvements I wanted to see.

My mind started to wander and I started thinking about my newfound organizational skills. I started the high-level design for a tool to organize my scatterbrain. Thankfully, I decided to just keep it in my backlog and continue on what I was working on.

td;dr: 1. Add projects to backlog 2. Weigh benefits of each, rank them 3. Work on #1 project 4. (Optional) Set a deadline to re-evaluate priorities 5. When new ideas pop up, add to backlog. Fill in as much detail as possible. The goal is to do a braindump and get back to what you were previously working on.

Re: Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?

#227

Post by yizhang7210 »

1. I personally find it easier to work on things I'm passionate about. So I think you need some kind of motivation to keep you going. It could be that you want to show it to your friends, or it could be you dream the possibility of turning it into a business.

2. You mentioned that you'd like to learn a lot more on languages and frameworks. Presumably you need to actually do something relatively substantial with the language/framework to learn it to a reasonable level? So for me personally some of my personal project I did were purely for learning. I think that's another motivation that can keep you going.

3. You talk about finishing project. I don't know if any project can be "finished". So I think it's okay to recognize that you want to leave a project in a particular state and move on and not feel too bad about it.

Re: Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?

#228

Post by wcarss »

zulban wrote: post #86

I've finished loads of hobby projects, despite full time jobs, and I've been told that I'm a bit of an expert on this. I see there's lots of comments already so I'll keep it short. 1) If you can't focus on a project longer than two days, then pick a project you can finish in three days. Honestly evaluate how big such a project can be. I also see this as students learn to code. They learn the basics then think they're…

My answer takes from the Feynman approach to problem solving: have several projects laying around that you could easily pick back up to work on a little bit. The progress may not be constant, but it builds over time.

This is a variation on the parent post's suggestion of picking a project you can finish in three days. I find that task can itself be hard, and is work that gets in the way of the fun work. In the past I've burnt out my excitement while trying to do it.

So I have 5+ small games, a game engine, an interpreter and a compiler, a few short stories, some music projects, a personal website, some art projects, and several books to read, and most aren't done.

When inspiration strikes, e.g. I'm feeling musical, I open up my music folder and click around a bit. Or if I feel like making a game, the first thing I do is go play one of my existing half-built games, and pop open the editor. It is helpful here to leave things in a working-ish state and keep ideas around in text files about what you could do next. Make picking the project back up easy for yourself.

I do also start new things or decide not to come back to old ones, but I wound up here by realizing that my interests aren't actually infinite. There's only about a dozen distinct things I really want to do and periodically get excited about.

For years I had been starting and then totally dropping projects, but I had "started making a game" a hundred times. My plan became to treat random projects like turning a ratchet, and I feel it's gone great from there.

Re: Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?

#230

Post by pmohun »

pdr2020 wrote: post #113
zulban wrote: post #86

I've finished loads of hobby projects, despite full time jobs, and I've been told that I'm a bit of an expert on this. I see there's lots of comments already so I'll keep it short. 1) If you can't focus on a project longer than two days, then pick a project you can finish in three days. Honestly evaluate how big such a project can be. I also see this as students learn to code. They learn the basics then think they're…

Point 2 is such a golden piece of advice and so obvious in hindsight, yet this is the first time I've encountered it online. If you have any online written pieces or blogs, please share them.

You might find this interesting: https://philmohun.substack.com/p/work-with-the-door-open
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