There are a lot of great responses in this thread. One thought I had is to maybe set a goal to “release” like a week or even weekend from the time you start. Bang out the minimal viable product with a buddy and get your project into an alpha phase. You don’t need to openly share it but that milestone might help you to set a cadence of success that will keep you working on the project and meeting more future releases.
Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything
131–140 of 174 posts
Re: Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything
#132Because it gets boring.
You're looking for a feeling of excitement, to really feel alive.
After the initial rush, that feeling fades. So do your chances of finishing the project.
Recognize that rush/excitement/feeling alive WILL NOT come from your project.
Disassociate that feeling from the project.
Then you'll pick projects far more stingily.
And then you'll finish one of those projects.
Re: Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything
#133Creation and destruction are both very attractive. Maintenance is not.
Re: Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything
#134Try to build something that you would use by yourself for daily job/needs and then share with others
Or extract something from main job code base into open source library
Re: Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything
#135It's like one of those 80/20 rule things.
Something like 25% of any given project is the 'fun' part. These include refining the basic idea; building a prototype; getting some simple functions working; seeing it do one or two things extremely well.
The other 75% is the 'grunt work' part that may not be fun to work on (e.g. documentation, bug fixes, refactoring, etc.) but is often absolutely necessary to have a 'finished' project. (Not that any project is really ever finished, but rather one that is usable to a large audience)
I have experienced this with various projects I have worked on over the years; whether ones I worked on professionally while working for someone else, or my own 'hobby projects' that I did in my spare time.
Re: Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything
#136Life is short. Life is what happens in between empty neglected side projects on GitHub.
Re: Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
"ADD" is so prevalent that it's basically part of normal human variation, and has enormous advantages. The name ought to be changed. I find the knee-jerk suggestion of medication offensive tbh. It's like medicating introversion. The trick is to learn how to use these personality traits to succeed, not to use a chemical cosh to beat yourself into being just like everybody else.
Prevalence in adults is 0.5% to 1%. Around a half of the population is introverted. OP, please see a doctor.
Depends which country you're in. Predicted prevalence is 2-3% (you'll see higher quoted) diagnosis rate in the US is higher, of course, and lower elsewhere. 2.5% is higher than a lot of popular modern identities. By all means see a therapist, but you don't need to assume that medicalising normal variation is the right thing to do.
Re: Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything
#138OP, bear in mind that you're still learning a great deal from all this. It's not a valueless activity. You're losing interest once the challenge and novelty have gone. It may not be in your interest to punish yourself into finishing something like this. Turn it into a superpower - you'll make one hell of a consultant.
I might be less favorable for OP but for me it looks like projects stop being interesting when any real challenge comes up. Making up name and setting basics for project sound like OP does only easy stuff but has no interest to go into details. Just like my nephew when playing games, he could “get bored” by 5 games in 1 hour. What I noticed was — he was switching because he was bad at these games but would not admit…
Well that's quite a different situation. I agree. It depends what is stopping the projects.
Re: Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything
#139I can’t speak about successful projects yet, but I have begun to make more progress in the past few weeks than I have in the rest of my life. Here’s the thing: if you have ADHD, don’t fight it, work with it. Have several different projects going on and rapid shift between them when you feel yourself getting tired. A problem here, a paragraph here, it adds up. This turns out to be much more useful as an adult at work than as a child at school because this allows you to do the job successfully in a way you can’t as a student.
Also, use the depth of your focus to your advantage in making connections and going deep. Again, helps improve stamina.
Re: Ask HN: I am overflowing with ideas but never finish anything
#140Here is the problem.
The human memory is limited. When you are first excited about something you get lots and lots of fleeting ideas. By the time you are working on the ideas, you have most likely forgotten most of them and then you are stuck. You no longer know what the next incremental step is, even though you feel it should be obvious.
My most successful project was organized via GitHub issues with a title and no content. To start to get into the mindset of shipping all you have to do is gather a bunch of these issues and assign them to a milestone, that is your product, your initial release. It doesn't matter if it is only 1% of the final vision, you will have many more milestones after this one. After your first milestone what you should do is get users. If you can't, then you should stop unless you need the software yourself. If a milestone is too big and you can't finish it in the deadline you gave yourself but you finished a significant amount of issues, then just take some of the issues out and shift them to the next milestone. Shipping will become a regular habit instead of some mysterious event in the far away future.