31–40 of 99 posts
Consider looking into the symptoms and characteristics of adult ADHD, especially if you ever had episodes of hyperactivity as a child. It's probably not what's going on, but frequently switching jobs (projects) can be a flag. 9 out of 10 adults with it are undiagnosed, and treatment is very effective.
http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_you...
I think you're all missing the obvious solution. He should tell all of us what he is working on and where he is stuck. Think of the collective brainpower on here, surely someone will be able to point him to a solution. Or the consensus should tell him that the problem he is facing has no known solution. He wrote the entire post without even hinting at the idea. Is he afraid that we will find some flaw with it?
The problem comes down to programming, I decided to leave it from the post as the post is more about the situation. I know I'm not alone with this problem, and any non-specific advise offered to me from writing this post may also help others.
Just like eating bad food and watching TV, being productive is a habit. Get in the habit and you'll find yourself up early on weekends working on your projects. The way to feed the habit is with success. To experience successes, I have found: - first minimize your goals. The less to do, the faster to succeed. The fastest way to finish a feature is by removing it from the plan. - work on one project, maximum two. Any…
But what about my MMO and a dozen other half formed projects each with their own litter of bastard experimental branches?
I was able to end this cycle with a little technique. Tell no one about your ideas. Not a SINGLE person. Instead, imagine their faces when they actually see it. If you spend four months working on a project in secrecy and then become tempted to move on to something else that you're working on, you'll quickly notice that the burst of endorphins you get as you enumerate the features of your killer app is mostly absent. Suddenly, you realize that you're four months out and now you have to start from scratch before you can talk about how amazing your project is. If you can't help but talk about your projects, then become a hermit (that's what I did).
My father is an engineer, and he always taught me that there's no such thing as a good job half completed. The problem with his perspective is that it is uni-dimensional, and with good reason: if you half-build a bridge, people are going to be sad. He's an engineer and he's got to finish the bridge. However, my father didn't decide that a bridge was required, nor did he choose the ideal location for the bridge based…
I think the idea of a person who does things from start to finish his highly romanticized and a lot less comon than whwat you might think. It's great for you to have the abilities to, but I don't think it's a reality to most.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem comes down to programming, I decided to leave it from the post as the post is more about the situation. I know I'm not alone with this problem, and any non-specific advise offered to me from writing this post may also help others.
Programming? You can outsource parts of that, via elance.com or similar services, if you don't know how to program yourself.
My father is an engineer, and he always taught me that there's no such thing as a good job half completed. The problem with his perspective is that it is uni-dimensional, and with good reason: if you half-build a bridge, people are going to be sad. He's an engineer and he's got to finish the bridge. However, my father didn't decide that a bridge was required, nor did he choose the ideal location for the bridge based…
I agree with most of this post, but I disagree with this sentence. It's very, very easy to trick yourself into believing that a great idea that you're working on is not actually interesting. The problem is that you've been working with the idea so much that you no longer are seeing the thing you're making with fresh eyes.
I know this because it's happened to me over and over again. My most salient example was when I was working on a game a few years ago. I got a month (this was during high school, so development times weren't that long :)) into development and started thinking it was crap, no one was going to like it - things like that. Normally, I would just stop and work on another idea, but this time I did something a bit unusual - I posted the game and asked for feedback from the game community. This was the turning point. They said that it was great, I should keep working on it, and they'd love to play it when it was done.
I finished it. It turned out to be my most successful game, ever. It netted hundreds of thousands of views. It's been on dozens of websites. And to think that I was completely bored and uninterested with it weeks before I finished.
Incidentally, I think this raises a great way of getting good at finishing: show your unfinished work to other people. If it's good, they'll love it, and the self-confidence boost you'll get from that can carry you further. And if they hate it, well, maybe you should be working on something else after all :-)
It started by instead of rushing headfirst, instead recording ideas into a text file. It quickly became apparent that revisiting something written mere weeks earlier would reveal it as total crap, uninteresting, or the wrong approach or similar. That file is now just under 1000 lines, only 3 of which are probably worth revisiting later. It also seems the act of recording an idea has a similar sense of reward that comes with working on it.
Another rule is to mercilessly cull anything half started in a fit of excitement: my ~/src shrank from something like 100 directories to just over 30 right now, and half of those are 3rd party. Lose half a night's sleep coding some crap? Recognize it's undirected crap, and rm it first thing in the morning. The effect of this is less wasted work, more stuff getting recorded and enduring review, less distraction and less temptation in future to mkdir super_foo_project ; vim a.c.
I also promised myself to only work on an idea after finishing the previous. Presently my last "big" idea started in 2008 and only needs a few weeks' dedication to finish. In the meantime tens of weekend projects remain unstarted, as they rightly should. When I finally gain the discipline to finish that project, I'll be in much better shape to execute in future.