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Idea Debt

jessicaabel.com

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Re: Idea Debt

#41

Post by nsb1 »

Thinking of this as 'debt' doesn't seem quite right to me. It's not like someone's going to come and break your kneecaps some day if you don't act on these ideas. You don't owe these ideas to anyone, and you don't have to 'pay them back'. Calling this debt is like calling the hours while we sleep and are not being paid 'income debt', or calling our front lawn 'food debt' because we haven't planted a garden there. How dare we!

I'm as guilty as anyone of amassing ideas and half-baked projects in various files and/or boxes of junk around the house, but I don't think of them as debt. They're all opportunities. Some are good, some are bad, and some have been missed, but they're not debt. I happen to think that some of them have the potential to make me a lot of money should I choose to implement them, but there are no guarantees. There is nobody out there saying, "Here's a check for $20M if you implement that idea right there, and you get to keep half."

'Follow your dreams'...'Do what you love and the money will follow'...'Nothing ventured, nothing gained' these are phrases that all sound great from the other side of success, but when you have a normal life with a family and a mortgage, the decision to pursue your opportunities is not as cut and dried. Having to weigh the consequences of not earning a paycheck to pursue one of these opportunities against food on the table or missing a mortgage payment, or even just not spending those evening free-time hours with your kids changes the equation substantially.

Re: Idea Debt

#42

Post by sharemywin »

bobby_9x wrote: post #2

This has happened to many so many times. The other situation I've had is that even when I start working on my next idea, I start getting distracted by a ton of new ones.

I think the more I work on my idea the worse it sounds compared to the others. But, I've decided to finish the product one way or the other.

Re: Idea Debt

#43

Post by miguelrochefort »

I've had this vision for a revolutionary system when I was 12. I think about it every single day. Yet, my only accomplishment is thousands of pages of notes and ideas about possible use cases for this system. I haven't wrote a single line of code. I tried blogging about it, but I can't decide where to start. You can find glimpse of the idea in some of my HN/Reddit posts/comments, but that's about it.

This have never felt satisfied or truly happy since. I don't know what to do next.

Re: Idea Debt

#44

Post by augustl »

rorykoehler wrote: post #33
danieltillett wrote: post #10

I love my idea debt. Not only are they a connection to my younger self, but old ideas are a rich ore to be mined for new ideas. Some of my best current ideas are old ideas that have been tweaked by experience or external change so they are now relevant. Keep working on your ideas, but make sure you are actually turning some of them into reality.

I find it amazing how many of the ideas from my vault exist in some form or other in the real world now.

I love the phrase "if you're the only one with an idea, it's probably a bad idea" :)

Re: Idea Debt

#45

Post by vdnkh »

I'm guilty of this, but I can't stop. What I do now is focus more more on "micro-ideas" which I can finish start to end in a day/weekend/week. Consequentially, these ideas are much harder to come by

Re: Idea Debt

#46

Post by jerf »

nsb1 wrote: post #41

Thinking of this as 'debt' doesn't seem quite right to me. It's not like someone's going to come and break your kneecaps some day if you don't act on these ideas. You don't owe these ideas to anyone, and you don't have to 'pay them back'. Calling this debt is like calling the hours while we sleep and are not being paid 'income debt', or calling our front lawn 'food debt' because we haven't planted a garden there. How…

I think the idea is that some people experience them as debt they owe themselves. If you've never felt that way, I can see why this would not make sense to you. (No sarcasm or harshness intended; I mean that straight.) Some of us had to come to this conclusion by a harder route. For myself, I still learned it fairly early, but I do remember learning it. My natural inclination was to finish everything.

As I type that, it occurs to me for the first time that I grew up in an environment where that was explicitly said to me sometimes. Even to this day, my now-retired father can be heard angsting about the projects he has not finished, and he tried his well-meaning best to pass that on to me. Perhaps this stems from the problems of leaving the physical projects he primarily works on half-done; a half-done remodeling is an ugly thing. A half-done car restoration takes up a lot of space and gets worse over time if you don't work on it as it basically rots. But creative projects have different rules. I've got at most a few hundred kilobytes of old programs lying in my sentimental directory... who cares? Who even knows? It's so tiny I tend to even forget it exists.

Re: Idea Debt

#47

Post by noxToken »

nsb1 wrote: post #41

Thinking of this as 'debt' doesn't seem quite right to me. It's not like someone's going to come and break your kneecaps some day if you don't act on these ideas. You don't owe these ideas to anyone, and you don't have to 'pay them back'. Calling this debt is like calling the hours while we sleep and are not being paid 'income debt', or calling our front lawn 'food debt' because we haven't planted a garden there. How…

> 'Follow your dreams'...'Do what you love and the money will follow'...'Nothing ventured, nothing gained' these are phrases that all sound great from the other side of success, but when you have a normal life with a family and a mortgage, the decision to pursue your opportunities is not as cut and dried. Having to weigh the consequences of not earning a paycheck to pursue one of these opportunities against food on the table or missing a mortgage payment, or even just not spending those evening free-time hours with your kids changes the equation substantially.

It's so refreshing to see someone else on the other side of start-up culture. I enjoy my current position including the people that I work with, but deep down, I would love nothing more than the option to do nothing all day if I wish. That always triggers the influx of, "Start your own business!" comments followed by, "Tons of people just quit, bootstrap and succeed!"

They ignore all of the failures. They ignore all of the people who ruined their family stability, who lost assets, or who gave up weeks/months/years of family time to chase a dream that didn't pan out. I'm not some curmudgeon who believes that chasing dreams is for suckers; I feel like it's very reasonable to want to set yourself up for continued stability (much like a 3-6 month emergency fund) if you're gambling your family's financial and mental well-being on your dream.

Re: Idea Debt

#48

Post by markokrajnc »

heipei wrote: post #30
vog wrote: post #4

This is why I moved a huge portion of my TODO list into an IDEAS list. This is an outliner document (Org-mode) that contains notes on lots of different ideas. So why didn't I just delete those items? Because writing down that stuff helps me not to think about it the whole day if I don't want to. The IDEAS list grows and grows, but that's okay. I don't feel obliged to implement any of these ideas. Whenever I recall an…

I had to laugh out loud because I have the exact same files (IDEAS and TODO, both uppercase) sitting in each of my projects as well as my homedir. On a more serious note, I can relate to a lot of the points the article makes about accumulating idea debt. I'm not sure yet whether it is holding me back, since I now have this huge list of things I might want to do, or whether it's giving me the opportunity to make a not…

Similar here... I had one large (master) TODO file and one large IDEAS file and I would move tasks from TODO file on my daily TODO list. The IDEAS file grown to more then 50 pages and I rarely read it... :-)

Nowdays I moved to paper so NSA can not read my ideas and tasks anymore. For TODOs I use one paper sheet per project/subject and carry all these 10-12 sheets in a folder. Then I move the tasks on my daily TODO list in Moleskine... For IDEAS: I draw/sketch/write them on paper and store them in archive folder (just in case I need it)... :-)

Re: Idea Debt

#49

Post by vkjv »

vog wrote: post #4

This is why I moved a huge portion of my TODO list into an IDEAS list. This is an outliner document (Org-mode) that contains notes on lots of different ideas. So why didn't I just delete those items? Because writing down that stuff helps me not to think about it the whole day if I don't want to. The IDEAS list grows and grows, but that's okay. I don't feel obliged to implement any of these ideas. Whenever I recall an…

I also use the `IDEA` tag in addition to `TODO` and `FIXME`. My definitions:

* IDEA: This is neat and could be helpful, but is probably okay if it never gets done.

* TODO: Not doing this has some measurable ill effect. Maybe maintainability or constraining scale.

* FIXME: This is a temporary work-around while finishing a feature. It should never be shipped.

Re: Idea Debt

#50

Post by kiiski »

vog wrote: post #23
boothead wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems similar to the idea of a spark file? http://lifehacker.com/5941997/defrag-your-brain-with-a-spark... edit Also do you have anything written down about using org-mode for todos and ideas?

> This seems similar to the idea of a spark file? Indeed! The concept of a "spark file" describes exactly what I'm doing. > Also do you have anything written down about using org-mode for todos and ideas? This is pretty basic Org-mode usage. My To-Do list is just nested headings, each with a TODO or DONE marker (Shift+Left, Shift+Right). My IDEAS list doesn't even have those markers, it is just nested headings and ne…

I would add that setting up some captures[1] helps a lot. That way you can easily add notes or tasks while working on other things.

[1]: http://orgmode.org/manual/Capture.html

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