Strategies for Long Projects

Excellent post.

A lot of this rings true to my experiences as well, particularly being defensive about time and commitments. Really, most of the authors points had me kind of nodding along.

On the other hand, I somewhat feel what the author is getting at with optimism, but I'm not sure optimism is the right word for what makes me productive. It's difficult to put into words, but I do agree there is a kind of strange attitude adjustment that has to happen.

You need to reach a point where you decide you're going to do something, regardless of what problems come up, or how long it takes. There are problems in my own projects that I know I'll need to solve, and I don't currently know the solutions, but I know I'll come up with solutions for them, and whatever I need to do to pragmatically solve them will just need to happen. It's less about me feeling confident in myself, and more just saying, "well, I care about the outcome, and I don't care what I need to figure out in order to get there." I know I'll put in the time, or find the resources, or learn, or give up whatever I need to give up to make it happen.

I don't know if I'd call that optimism though. It almost feels a bit more like stubbornness, or defiance. It's not just an assumption that things are going to work out.

Great post, with a lot of helpful advice.

I particularly found this point of view interesting, would love to hear some examples of it:

> Moreover, I believe that choosing to feel something can make you feel that way even if the feeling is artificially manufactured. What I mean by this is that when someone asks us to label how we feel, the label we select is based on how we physically feel at the moment. But what if you said the exact opposite of how you actually felt? Is it possible the re-labeling could become reality? This seems absurd on the face of it, but my experience has been that re-labeling works and causes an actual physical response.

I don't want to come across as putting down the author's work, but for the sake of everyone else, I want to reframe the definition of "long project".

This would be a nice post if it was titled "Strategies for Quick Projects". I'm on year 8 of what is likely a life-long project (at a pace that is doubling annually). That's a fairly long project, but far from the longest. The Manhattan Project, the Human Genome Project, the Apollo project. The Shuttle program. The National Cathedral. These are long projects. They're big too. There are other long projects which might be considered "small". Learning violin is a long, small project. Cataloging all the species of flora and fauna on an island is a long, small-ish project. Cataloging all the microbiota on that island would be a medium-big project. Cataloging all the microbiota on a continent would outstrip the Human Genome Project by a factor of 100.

Something I have been wondering all these years I've been working on long-term projects is, how do others make relationships work with something that, almost by definition, consumes all of one's free time and energy?

In my experience, you can’t let truly long projects consume all your energy or else you’ll burn out on them and stop. The key for these is to put in a few hours consistently and allow yourself to use the rest of the time to relax and do other things.

That’s part of how the author can have 3 long-term projects at once— no single project is taking up all of his attention. You can make surprising progress if you set aside a single 3-4 hour session each week, and still have time for everything else.