A note to myself

The only problem with unfinished projects is that they leave you incomplete. When a project is complete, you get a sense of completion in your mind. Otherwise, it becomes a dangling thread of thoughts in the mind. It keeps taking space and mental cycles (even if it is in the subconcious). And that leaves little room for exploring new ideas and executing them. The mental space starts looking cluttered.

At the same time, there is this problem of when to call a project finished (or completed). As such, everything in this world is ever changing and ever evolving. And that means calling a project complete becomes more of a mental thing than a well defined state of the project itself. For example, if I start working on a movie now, I may feel complete by making the movie, or by making sure that it is seen by as many people as possible, or by creating a sequel that's even better than the first movie etc etc. In fact, in this example, the project goes through multiple well defined stages but there are projects where there are no well defined stages. Things like blog, business don't have well defined stages. There is nothing discreet in their progress. There are jumps but it is still a continum which goes on and on and on.

When I look back, I feel biking is one project I finished. I wanted to own a bike and travel around since college days. I bought one when I got into a job. I travelled to many places. And then during one trip, I felt complete from inside. I felt that I had done as much biking as I wanted to do. I could have done more; in fact, I did travel to more places after that. But there was no urge to hit the highway on bike anymore. Same thing happened with photography. I wanted to do photography. I bought a camera, shot many pictures and then eventually, I stopped clicking photographs because I started enjoying the moments better without a camera.

So, while it is important to complete projects, completion itself is a state of mind. Which makes it difficult to complete a project with the "intention to complete it". Because completion is not "about the project", it's about how "you relate to the project".

Seems like it could be a long shot in large organizations. The managers close enough to you to be on your side don't have enough clout to override HR responding with "we don't make changes to employee contracts", and the ones who do aren't in touch with the craft enough to understand why you'd want such an exception.

My problem is that all of my ideas are too big. It seems that every new idea I think of -- well, if I kept going with it and finished it to the extent that it matches my idea, it would take a year or two. I don't have two years to waste on an idea that may or may not help me. Maybe that's sad but it's real life™.

>Just write it down.

Cannot agree more. If you don't write it down, you will forget it. Trying to remember a feature, that you knew was good, but cannot remember now because you didn't write it down, can be frustrating.

Re: the last paragraph ("The lesson to be..."). Is it really the lesson you can learn? Doesn't this friend of yours know this? Didn't he actively try to persevere, to see how he works and what makes him stop and what could possibly keep him going?

To me it sounds more like description of a problem (i.e. just restating it). "A person starts many things but drops them before finishing. In other words, that person lacks perseverance."

A lesson to me would be something like... a) when you feel your passion for something going up, do X, b) when you have just started doing something new, do Y to ensure you don't drop it tomorrow, etc.

Have you perhaps seen these kinds of 'solutions' or approaches? (not just restating the essence of the problem, but actually attempting to solve it from the standpoint of the person _with_ the problem :) I think more than a couple people could benefit from this :)