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Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything

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21–30 of 174 posts

Re: Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything

#21
My solution to subclinical ADHD is to embark on a project of such ridiculous ambition and scope that it's never going to be finished anyway, where it's possible to work on different sub-projects within the larger project and still move forward.

Don't listen to people who tell you to keep your ambitions small. Small is boring and boring never gets done.

Re: Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything

#22
Maybe you just need a friend with business acumen.

I also must have 100s of projects that I started, built a bit, then abandoned when I got bored. But for some of them, friends and/or acquaintances later asked me to finish it for them (or their company). Staying motivated is much easier if you have a team rooting for you and excitedly asking for updates. Also, it feels fantastic to see your hobby project turn into a real product.

But business is a people's job and a team effort. So if you're more on the introverted tech side, you might need a trusted intermediaty between your problem solving skills and companies' unsolved problems.

Re: Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything

#23
The last 20% of any project is where 80% of the work lies. At the beginning its fun and frenetic, you can write tons of code and feel like you've made big progress. The last 20% is integrations, debugging, sometimes painful bits you had deferred to later.

What you need is discipline, not motivation. Motivation is fleeting, while important, it always runs out. Work on making a schedule and sticking to it as a goal unto itself. Make a contract with your future self and do it. Discipline is something you need to train, so expect to fail at first - but strive to improve in a structured way.

Also a note on small thing that has really helped me - don't tell anyone about your project till it is finished. I find talking about your half finished projects gives a similar sort of dopamine hit to finishing and can rob you of the gratification which would drive you to finish.

Re: Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything

#24
But if you don't have the interest to work on something (particular) any more, do you really want techniques or whatever to push through anyway?

I suppose it depends what the goal is - the question being asked suggests to me you want a successful side project (or even full time business?) no matter what it is, the tech it uses, etc. If that's the case, then I can't speak to motivation, but you need to pick a project based on identifying a niche, product market fit, etc., not experimenting with what's hot and sparking your interest this week.

If that's not right, then I think the question's wrong, and maybe you just need to come to terms with it being ok to experiment with things, prototype things; that they don't have to turn into an MVP that anyone else ever sees, you're just having fun/learning about things.

And even if it's a bit of both, you want the successful business, just only if you love the tech or idea, then you're still doing nothing wrong, because all these so far have not panned out in the loving it sense before they had a chance to pan out or not in the business success sense (so that's inconsequential).

Re: Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything

#25
What has worked for me is trying to build a product and focusing on user needs (as opposed to being a technical demo), which need not be monetized in any way.

The focus on users makes helps you in planning many aspects of the project which you may not have considered otherwise, as well as keeps you on track. (Why am I overcomplicating this, don't I just need X to work like this?)

Re: Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything

#27
Ideas are worthless. As a project manager and game creator, I can see you don’t have something to achieve. You masterfully avoided the essential: WHAT ARE YOU BUILDING? To me for example, how I achieve my goals (coding, framework, design) is irrelevant, I just want to get the idea out and implement it in its finest details. Also to note, the 80 20 rule: the last 20% of the project is 80% of the build time. So, you’re focusing in the wrong things. Hope this helps, good luck!

ps: also as a side note, if you don’t focus on anything, perhaps a physical activity or job would do you good: yoga, sports.

Re: Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything

#28
Having gone through the same problem, I think it's important to develop a mental framework on how to evaluate ideas. I no longer feel excited by the prospect of a new language, or a framework, because it would be an uphill battle to drive up the adoption. Once you start thinking critically, you'd have fewer competing ideas, and hopefully, a longer lasting motivation.

Instead of acting upon the idea by coding it right away, write it down and evaluate it against a fixed set parameters. YC Application questions are a great starting point [1]. Few questions I routinely ask myself:

1. Will this make money? If yes, how soon?

2. If you've to tell people about it, where would you go?

3. Are there existing solutions that solve the same problem? How are you being different from them?

4. How long will it take to ship the first version?

5. Are you solving a problem that you've personally faced?

6. Does the solution save time/money?

Having said that, I think it's a okay to act on a burst on inspiration once in a while. The problem is that we have often direct our energy to inconsequential stuff—name, design, or dreaming how this could be next big thing. Just worry about shipping and everything will fall in place if the idea has legs.

[1]: https://technode.com/2011/03/18/y-combinator-application-que...

Re: Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything

#29
I feel you...this describes a lot of my github. I find I burn out after I get the fun technical part done and it's a viable proof of concept. The polishing going to release it to others is a high burden. I recently have been building something that in passionate about with a level of polish that is not typical. Here are some pointers from that experience and some of the others I actually got into the hands of other people. All depends on your motivations but here are some things I think drove me (outside of work hobby development)

1) find something you are passionate about or that solves a problem for you or people you care about

2) "don't try to boil the ocean", sounds like you are already trying to scope your projects well, but really focus on the smallest minimum viable initial product you can get into the hands of others for feedback.....

3) find users or some external force driving you to finish. It helps me when I have some constraint on time that drives progress. User feedback and showing your work to someone is incredibly motivating.

4) find the part you usually burn out on. For me it getting the interesting part database backed with a web GUI. I always joked the perfect UI was command line, but for many users it's not. I found a tech stack that I am productive in and enjoy writing in (Refine.dev,Supabase). I had tried for years to find something that stuck...all the way back to when rails was the new hotness.

5) Automate work flows so working on your project does not involve slogging through manual processes. CI/CD is pretty easy to set up these days with GitHub actions, netlify, fly.io etc.

6) find ways to integrate stuff you read about on hacker news or other sites into your project. Use it as a sandbox for testing out new technologies you read about.

7) chatGPT...some of my least favorite parts of a project, chat gpt has made immeasurably easier. This resource is truly game changing, helping my productivity and letting me quickly prototype new functionality.

Re: Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything

#30
You need to realize that those new frameworks and APIs are not really new, they are just a different view on the same constraints that we all have when programming.

It's 90% marketing: a new tool promises to be 10x faster than the other in some circumstances, but forgets to mention that it has a lot of important features missing.

Some frameworks compile to JS (a pain to debug), some don't (but then they have less clean CSS separation because those tools are limited in what they can do).

Then there's the HTML only movement that forgets to mention that it gets complicated whenever there are dependencies between data.

The problems you are facing are real, but switching to different frameworks will get you different sets of problems that you need to face. What's important is to understand what's going on behind the scenes and move forward with your project, whether it's in the framework you're using or the new one.

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