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Idea Debt

jessicaabel.com

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Re: Idea Debt

#81

Post by caseysoftware »

This is one of the reasons we put together "Finish Up Weekend" - http://fuweekend.com/

It's a hackathon weekend when you're not allowed to start anything new. You are only allowed to bring things to finish. It's not strictly coding, we've had lawyers, screenwriters, artists, authors, and sewing projects completed. The positive peer pressure is great.

When you finish something, you get to ring a bell so we can celebrate briefly.. and then get back to work.

And there are no prizes, just the satisfaction of getting things done.

Re: Idea Debt

#82

Post by bpchaps »

caseysoftware wrote: post #81

This is one of the reasons we put together "Finish Up Weekend" - http://fuweekend.com/ It's a hackathon weekend when you're not allowed to start anything new. You are only allowed to bring things to finish. It's not strictly coding, we've had lawyers, screenwriters, artists, authors, and sewing projects completed. The positive peer pressure is great. When you finish something, you get to ring a bell so we can celebra…

Love the idea! Don't see any upcoming dates, though :(.

Do you guys do anything in Chicago?

Re: Idea Debt

#83

Post by AnimalMuppet »

beat wrote: post #68
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…

It's debt in that we pay interest on it. Resources that could be spent on the here and now instead go to maintaining the idea that's not getting paid off.

But as jerf said, it doesn't have to be that way. It's just an idea file, not debt, unless you pay interest on it. If it saps your emotional, mental, or physical energy, then it's debt. And that may depend on your personality, not just on having "that kind of thing" laying around.

Re: Idea Debt

#84

Post by caseysoftware »

bpchaps wrote: post #82
caseysoftware wrote: post #81

This is one of the reasons we put together "Finish Up Weekend" - http://fuweekend.com/ It's a hackathon weekend when you're not allowed to start anything new. You are only allowed to bring things to finish. It's not strictly coding, we've had lawyers, screenwriters, artists, authors, and sewing projects completed. The positive peer pressure is great. When you finish something, you get to ring a bell so we can celebra…

Love the idea! Don't see any upcoming dates, though :(. Do you guys do anything in Chicago?

Not yet but we're looking to spread the model.

Drop me an email and I'm happy to chat details. :)

Re: Idea Debt

#85

Post by wolfgke »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #43

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…

I'd set up a wiki to bring the notes and ideas in order.

Re: Idea Debt

#86

Post by geezer »

hellofunk wrote: post #25

Steven King has said something that I've come to support, that note/list-keeping is a great way to let bad ideas survive. He claims that a really good idea will survive in your head on its own, and a bad idea will die. And that by writing down every idea, you are polluting your landscape of possibilities by immortalizing ideas that are better left forgotten.

I would disagree with Steven King here. Once you write down ideas, it allows you to reconsider them later in a different light, a difference context. I believe that is extremely valuable because it is crucial to analyze an idea from various perspectives before embarking on implementing it. Embarking on an idea not well thought out can be extremely expensive.

Re: Idea Debt

#87

Post by callmeed »

junto wrote: post #75
xhrpost wrote: post #52

This, this is probably the biggest and yet least recognized obstruction for wannapreneurs. I know because I've been there myself for years and have only recently realized what I was doing. I would get really excited about an idea, start working on it, only work on the interesting parts (not on what actually had to come next) and then let it fizzle away as the next wave of emotion came with another idea. I would justi…

I don't know if this is just me, but I used to be full of ideas, half finished projects and several projects that I talked myself out of. Since having children, I no longer have ideas, and rarely work on anything than paid contract work. Has anyone else experienced this? I feel void of ideas.

Somewhat but not exactly. I have 3 children at home. I still get plenty of ideas, sometimes I even do research or hack up a quick rails scaffold to see how it might start. I just no longer spend nights & weekends banging it out until I get to the half-finished stage.

Re: Idea Debt

#88

Post by abrie »

The majority of this thread's comments relate personal experiences, so I might as well contribute mine as well. Nearly a decade ago I started work on a project. For eight years progress consisted of taking notes and daydreaming. I was going to write a book that would make me famous. Over the years the dream-ideas progressed from a paper book, to an iPod book, to a HTML5 book. The daydreams always kept up with the available technology. Finally, two years ago, I suddenly started working on the thing. It is a travelogue, written for Android. The difficulties of implementation were unexpected and surprising. And now that it's approaching completeness a new set of unexpected problems arise. I'd assumed that simply writing a book would be enough to sell it; but apparently a lot of marketing is required. Daydreaming has benefits, but it costs time.

Edit: Having mentioned marketing; here is video screen cap of the book: https://youtu.be/yX4JTS-eIqQ

Re: Idea Debt

#89

Post by nairboon »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #43

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…

I glanced briefly over your posts and it seems that you're dealing with a complex system. The trouble with those is that you can't just break it down to a simple prototype, because by simplifying it you lose exactly the properties you're interested in.

Actually building it, requires a solution to a couple of hard problems, which themselve pull in even more. So the longer you work on it, the slower you make any progress and the easier it is to get lost just by the sheer range of ways to tackle it.

However, somehow those complex ones are just way more interesting for myself, I pick them every time over "the simple things", but the result is, that I too can't show any visible progress, because it's not done yet and no simple prototype can show/imitate the system as a whole. If you ever discover a sound methodology for these kinds of problem, please tell me about it.

Re: Idea Debt

#90

Post by ktRolster »

bitJericho wrote: post #76
cableshaft wrote: post #74

While a lot of people have tons of ideas that they can only execute on a few of them, there's quite a few people have the talent to make things that don't have the deluge of ideas invading their mind every day. I think the idea people should be a little less protective of their ideas, especially the ones they know will never get made, and flesh them out just enough so others can run with it, and then put it out there…

It's called crowdsourcing and I haven't seen it really work because ideas are a dime a dozen. Create. Don't think about it.

As a programmer, I have skills to build basically anything, but I don't have any ideas for what to build. If someone gave me an idea that would really capture my imagination, I would really appreciate it.

("Yet Another Ad Network" doesn't capture my imagination)

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