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Finish your projects

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Re: Finish your projects

#141

Post by v7n »

codersfocus wrote: post #67

I read a very boring but useful paper on curiosity by Lowenstein. He frames curiosity as a drive (similar to eg hunger.) If you’re starting but not finishing projects, maybe it’s due to curiosity about a sub problem that you hack a solution for. But once your curiosity is satisfied and you have no other drive eg money, stars on Github, you finish without releasing it

In my native Finnish tongue we do use, interchangably, expressions "tiedonjano" and "tiedonnälkä" which directly translate to thirst/hunger for knowledge. Even "tiedonmuru" is a crumb of knowledge or data, as in bread crumb.

Re: Finish your projects

#142

Post by Joel_Mckay »

Rule #1: Quickly identify a failure to resolve critical paths to completion. Some projects are simply doomed without the right people, resources, and market conditions.

See "Law of holes" corollary:

"Nor would a wise man, seeing that he was in a hole, go to work and blindly dig it deeper..." ( The Washington Post dated 25 October 1911 )

Re: Finish your projects

#143

Post by kaba0 »

BeetleB wrote: post #60
aarondf wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad you still liked it, despite the strong complaints! I hear your feedback, but I don't fully agree with all of it. I do understand the sunk cost fallacy quite well, but thinking about the time committed can be a useful framing to help push past the fear of releasing or drudgery of the last 10%. > If you tell yourself that every time you don't release a project, the fix is not to release the project, but to stop te…

> I mean, if you never ship you're literally the kind of person who doesn't ship though This is a bit of an "argument from extremes" fallacy. If you don't ship 90% of what you work on, but do ship the remaining 10%, then that may well not only be fine, but optimal . My point is that saying to yourself "Every time you don't release a project, you're telling yourself that you’re the kind of person who doesn't ship." is…

I recognize the author’s argument from the Atomic Habits books — inner motivation heavily stems from the picture of self.

The example used in the book (there used for stopping negative habits) was that of smoking. A smoker that is looking to quit goes out with a colleague for a smoke break, and the colleague offers him one. If he refuses by saying “I don’t smoke now/I’m trying to quit”, he will much more likely not be able to quit his addiction. But if he answers with “I’m not a smoker”, he is on a good path.

It was a really eye opening part of that book for me - people’s view of themselves recursively depends on past experiences/facts and inner motivations. If we do (or don’t do in case of smoking) something a lot of time we can accept it as our new selves, and vice versa.

Re: Finish your projects

#144

Post by Dalewyn »

kaba0 wrote: post #133
renewiltord wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Like how people are absolutely juiced to the gills on caffeine these days, riding a stimulant Shai Hulud across the sands of time.

Caffeine though really is a jackpot for humanity, it has realistically speaking no negative side effects. Even serious physical symptoms from withdrawal are basically just a week of headaches and other minor things.

Coffee's great, but sometimes I wish I could route the increased number of calls from Mother Nature to a voice machine.

Re: Finish your projects

#145

Post by kaba0 »

What helped me finish some of my projects was also choosing a realistically achievable goal. I have made the mistake of being overly ambitious many times, like how cool would it be to rewrite this and that as well from scratch, my version will be so much better, etc..

But it is sometimes simply not feasible, and we would be much better off with a less ambitious solution to the problem we have.

Last time I successfully applied this was a personal finance tracker, where instead of going at it reinventing the wheel I built my smaller project on top of the Plain Text Accounting ecosystem (beancount specifically).

Re: Finish your projects

#146

Post by kaba0 »

foobiekr wrote: post #138
kaba0 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caffeine though really is a jackpot for humanity, it has realistically speaking no negative side effects. Even serious physical symptoms from withdrawal are basically just a week of headaches and other minor things.

Disrupted sleep, lack of REM sleep, poor attentiveness, …

That is very dependent on the consumed quantity, and the time of consumption.

And is nothing compared to the next most frequently used drugs, alcohol and nicotine, hell it has plenty of positive effects.

So my initial statement I believe still stands that humanity could hardly happen upon another substance that they could use in such a huge amounts with minimal negatives.

Re: Finish your projects

#147

Post by joeig »

Regarding

> Decide upfront what you're going to work on.

and

> Behind the fear of releasing is often the fear of exposing your work, and yourself, to criticism.

When I plan to release my project's source code, it has helped me to release parts of the project up front as single-purpose libraries. This helps me think in smaller chunks of work, and makes me feel like I'm finishing more often. It also shortens the feedback cycle.

Re: Finish your projects

#148

Post by mbwgh »

rocho wrote: post #120

I found this paragraph so relatable: > Personally, I like to put a single song on repeat for hours and hours, days even. It helps me zone in. Why does this admittedly strange behavior help me? I'm not sure exactly, but I've known it to be helpful for more than half my life. I like to get up early before the family is awake, close Slack, put my phone in Do Not Disturb mode, and work. I even put a Post-it note on my mo…

> Finally, while I liked the article a lot, I disagree with the premise that projects _must_ be finished.

To be fair, the author admits that including maintenance, a project is never really finished.

Instead, he says that a project should be _published_. Preferrably, on GitHub :P

Re: Finish your projects

#149

Post by rpastuszak »

For those looking for more practical advice on the subject: https://sonnet.io/posts/sit/

> Finishing requires work

> Finishing requires courage

and

> "Just Work"

Hard to disagree with that, IMHO Sitzfleisch is akin to exposure therapy. But, in practice both items require having a deeper understanding of where the difficulty comes from. Instead of brute-forcing the problem (and sometimes setting up yourself for failure), it might better to develop tools that work you as an individual.

For instance, sometimes for me procrastination or avoidance can be a signal that I haven't been taking care of myself outside of work OR that deep down I just don't give shit about the project, but can't admit that to myself so just end up more frustrated. In this case leaving the house for 15 minutes or petting my dog works better than Sitzfleisch (cliche I know). Again, that's not always the case, but I think spotting those signals and making the appropriate choices is a muscle we develop through practice.

More on the subject in the article above and here: https://sonnet.io/posts/hummingbirds/

Re: Finish your projects

#150

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

One way to make sure (some) projects get finished is to not use semantic versioning, 1.0.0, 27.8.3, and so on, since integers can be incremented longer than the average lifespan, and instead use something like alpha-versioning which starts at 0.0.0-0 and ends at 1.0.0-0, that is, reaching 1.0 is actually the death of the project, its tombstone saying non perfectus sed perfectibilis non amplius (Latin for gravitas: not perfect, but perfectible no more).

At the other end, having goals which extend well beyond the average lifespan is what could be considered as the root of wisdom.

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