Ask HN: I am busy with too many things at once

Some really good advice here, thanks guys.

I think it might help if you start looking at different technologies and languages as tools to get done. And those are guaranteed to keep changing. So you start focusing on doing or building something with those tools. This way you won't be overwhelmed by too many things floating around and try to get something meaningful out of whatever you are learning. It is really difficult to be an expert in many things at one time and very few succeed in it - but it is possible to be moderately successful in learning those and put them to use (and unless you use those, reading blogs/books etc won't be long standing IMO and you will keep questioning yourself if you have really learnt it or not).

I am as well guilty of starting many side projects and working on them in parallel (about 20 currently). I tried various approaches of "managing myself" in order to get some progress on all of them. I tried to limit the number of projects drastically and also to a single one. That did not really work, because my heart was always drawn to these other projects that I had discarded. So currently I have these 20 projects and try to keep track of all of them. I choose one from day to day and try to work on it. And so far this approach works quite well.

I think it boils down to weither you keep track of all your projects (what's to be done next), that you do not try to plan ahead too much and that you do not plan too many tasks for a single day. If you stick to these guidelines there is a high probability that you get a good experience ("did that, finished that") every now and then which keeps you going.

Whatever you're not enjoying, stop. Whatever you are enjoying, keep. A career is too long to be carrying the things which turn it from being "a hobby" into a "real job"™.

I've often found that if I tried to do something because I thought it would be good for my long term career prospects I just wasn't that motivated. However I often found myself circling back to the same technology or topic at a later date out of pure interest and was highly motivated then. Attitude toward what you're working on and your reason for doing it is almost everything.

Sounds like you're maybe feeling a little burnt out if I'm honest. It happens to all of us. Whenever it happens to me I either increase the frequency of my other hobbies I enjoy (water sports) or if its a particularly bad spell, try looking into some completely unrelated area of inquiry (for me that can be space, cartography, travel, electronics, brewing beer, etc - even learning a musical instrument). I find that it not only stimulates my mind again but ultimately I start to make new connections about how my existing software skills can be applied to this new area of interest. New project ideas start to flow... and off we go again.

Could you elaborate on your snark? Do you think OOP design patterns become outdated quickly? Do you think it's a waste of time for a programmer to study them?