A couple times this week

A couple times this week I came home from work completely exhausted and ended up falling asleep around 10pm on the couch, silly sci-fi novel (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress) dangling from my fingertips. It's not because work is exhausting. I think I'm exhausting myself by self-imposed deadlines for personal projects outside of work and perhaps taking on too many projects at once. Only last week I wrote an entry about how I didn't feel like I was taking on too many projects, but somehow knew in the back of my mind not to trust my feelings and never posted the entry. It's a downward spiral, because I work myself in order to try to get over the impression that I'm taking on a lot of projects but not finishing them. By delaying them even further due to being tired I feel like I'm only proving my suspicions right, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe I'm not as good at working on lots of things at once as I have led myself to believe.

Here's a quick list of projects, as much to jog my own memory as to offer for your own: moblogging site (25% done), double blind email system (25% done), hellomachine (25% done... still!), political site (15% done), man versus himself self-promotion and self-parody (40% done), new novel (still in planning), learning lojban (still reading "what is lojban" book). Soon I'll be taking up learning how to develop applications in Cocoa on OS X (my new 15" powerbook is on its way as we speak). In the meantime I've lapsed in my gym-membership usage, have upped my evening activities with friends, and have brand new cavities (despite my fervent sonicare usage). I need to reign myself in, get my house in order, etc... but what to dust off and what to throw out?

A while ago I gave myself a November 4th deadline for figuring out my next 5 year plan. I have some good leads, here are some keywords in my mind: to be and not to be, building increasingly complex creative objects, focus on no context. Will my 5 year plan help establish a direction that will make obvious which projects are worth doing and which aren't? Oi.

Anyone that's been reading this blog for a while recognizes this pattern. I could go dig up the identical entries (with different project names and timestamps) from the last 4 years (have I really been writing this same old nonsense that long?). Each time there's this hope that I might find the way out of repeating history the next time, since I know this history so well, but I think the two steps forward, two steps back rhythm is a more permanent pattern than that (though I don't think it's healthy to admit that, it's a little like giving up). Each time I walk back and forth between doing nothing and doing everything I just reinforce the groove in the carpet. Maybe I'm not a changing thing, but a static thing that shakes a bit. Getting lost in boring thoughts, what a drag.

I want to talk about loyalty sometime soon. Is loyalty a good thing? Because I have none of it: not to my friends, family, company, country, religion, species, or universe. I think loyalty is just group-imposed lock-in designed to increase perceived exit costs... but loyalty has no value to the individual beyond protecting them from their own bad decisions. If you trust your decision making, loyalty shouldn't be a part of the equation, should it? I know, random. I bet the group will come kill me now.

One more thing. Nah, nevermind.

Comments

[Frank Patrick]

25% done
It's not how many things you decide to take on. It's how many things you try to do at the same time. Let's see...with the totally bogus assumption that your five stated projects are roughly equivalent in needs of your time, at least one would be done, and I suspect that if you took out all the "now where was I?" time required by getting things 25, 15, and 40% done, the second would be a lot further along than the remainder 30%, maybe even done. Just a thought.

[Frank Patrick]

One more thing. Yeah.
Regarding the idea of which efforts are worth doing...If it's worth doing, it's worth finishing.

[Erik Benson]

I agree, multi-tasking projects isn't the most effecient way to get results. A couple of benefits that it does have, however: you can take a break from one project by working on another (at any given point in a project's duration, there are tasks of different sizes, and sometimes you want to work on a small task so you can choose the project that has a task to fit, and other times you want a big task... so while you lose time in switching between projects, you may be able to fit more work into a given period), ideas from one project can supplement another project, getting one thing done at a time is nice, but not necessarily worse than doing a lot of things for a long time and then finishing all of them together. For some reason, I think our brains try to optimize by multitasking... whether it be in books we're reading or projects we're working on or applications we're using... but I have heard studies that say that the perceived benefit is actually not there, so you're probably right. I'll have to think about it some more.

And also... I agree that if a thing is worth doing, it's worth finishing. But that just changes the dilemma from deciding if it's worth finishing to whether it's worth doing. The problem is still there though.

[joshp]

worth starting
I think a lot of ideas require you to start prototyping them so you can see if they are worth doing. If they aren't worth finishing, that doesn't mean they weren't worth starting. Maybe the key here is to be clear about whether you are building a prototype or a finished project. Some of the things you've listed seem like projects (promoting your book) some are prototypes (planning your next one, building a mobloging site).

This problem is really about managing your "designs in inventory". What you really ought to care about is how fast you can get an idea through that queue, and how many times you can turn it. To speed it up you need to be more ruthless about flushing the queue.

What I mean here is the prototype doesn't have to be code complete or feature complete to be finished (it's a prototype after all), but it does have to have rendered the bulk of the hidden information it is going to produce. At that point, I'd bet the project is either clearly easier or harder than it was when you started. Move it onto a production queue if it's easier and looks promising (or really if you can estimate the value of it), and stick it on the "done" shelf if it got harder or if the value isn't clear (unless, someone is paying you to complete it). You can always pull the prototype off the shelf to work on later or combine with a different idea.

The other part of the discipline that seems like is missing is scheduling. Work expands to fill the time allowed. How many of these projects have a "budget" for time. When you start a new idea, give yourself a time limit, and if the experiment stalls or takes too long -- write a quick note about the status of the stalled (or too big) project and declare it "completed" even if it's incomplete. You'll be able to make a more accurate cost estimate based on what you learned from the first crack at it.

[Erik Benson]

I think all of my projects are prototypes--I just happen to launch some of them and call them complete: this site, allconsuming, nervousness, seattle stories, adfarm, even the novel. I would love to hand over allconsuming to a team of software developers and designers to actually build... unfortunately I don't have such a team so I move on to the next prototype. I think for the most part (now that I can see the potential problem) I manage the design inventory well enough... I don't often work on projects past the point of value (which is why I didn't continue to revise the novel, and why I gave away nervousness and adfarm), but I think the current ideas in the queue aren't quite prototype-complete yet. That's why they'd be so difficult to abandon. I think the double-blind one is actually much further along than I stated... it's probably closer to 75% done. Hellomachine may be too big... though it's probably the one I have the most love for. Shoot, I don't know if I like looking at things this way... what about the genius of the 'and'?