What if personal projects are not meant to be finished? Journey and destination and all that? Perhaps for some it's more about the endless noodling about and whittling away bits and pieces, and a "project" is just a convenient excuse do do it?
One way to think about it is to ask yourself, is your personal project actually _playtime_? Playing is not goal oriented and therefore very relaxing. There is nothing wrong with that! I am happy to "play" programming and I learned a lot of techniques that I used years later - and then actually finishing it. Do not deny yourself playtime!
Agree completely. Reframe recreational programming as your favorite video game, and you’ll feel much more satisfied after a session that produces nothing, because that was never the point.
Agreed completely. Sometimes I've worked hard to put the finishing touches on side projects to make them usable by others and have been pleasantly surprised by the interest. But in most cases, even when I finish, almost no one cares.
And while finishing is an important lesson early on, just so you know how hard that "last 20%" is, it's grueling and not typically very informative or unique after that first couple times.
So I'm now squarely in the camp of do what I want and finish what I want on the side, with no guilt. If I enjoy the journey I call it good. Finishing is for the day job.
Exactly. I do side projects because they are fun. No pressure,
no expectations. Simply and pure knowledge gaining and programming… which I love.
I already have a boss asking me 9-5 when I will finish project X, so I don’t need that pressure when doing things by myself. Besides, some things are never meant to be finished (e.g., eating healthy, doing exercise, gaining knowledge, etc.)
> What if personal projects are not meant to be finished?
The key is deciding on 2 things before you start anything:
1. What is the goal?
2. How will I know it’s done?
With this approach you can start side projects purely to have fun for an afternoon or to learn a thing or to see how a technology or approach feels. Then you can drop it and move on. Goal achieved, thing learned, no need to keep going.
The worst projects in my experience come from unclear goals and fuzzy definitions of done. Those projects tend to drag on forever, burden your life, and fill up your days with busywork.
Note that it’s always okay to add additional goals to the same project once you’re done.
But because finishing is hard (and not fun) it’s also easy to make up reasons for why you don’t finish things, without scrutinizing the underlying motivation.
Sometimes i look back and say “I’m glad I moved on” but I think a lot of the time I also just wish the thing was done.
I always thought of the journey as the reward and that was very sustainable and I have picked up a diverse skillset.
I think one doesn't need to finish a project. One should be able finish milestones or reset milestones appropriately.
This matters to me personally to feel good about myself. A society favors art or progress. Depending on which effort you identify with finishing may not matter.
Without the "convenient excuse", the journey starts looking like pure procrastination; how do you enjoy it without the guilt about not doing more important work that leads to more important results?
What if it's a bit of both? Something dawned on me today when mulling on another related idea "systems vs goals", popularized by Scott Adams in "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big"[0]. It was a widely popular book at the time, even here on HN, but the core idea never worked for me. Nor even resonated.
Quoting from the book[1]:
"A goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don't sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, its a system. If you're waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it's a goal."
Boring, ain't it?
For me, the problem with project, systems, and enjoying journey over destination is that:
1) Projects don't motivate me for long; past initial excitement, I'm rarely able to muster enough motivation from the dream of finishing something (and enjoying the spoil) to move me past static friction.
2) "Journey over destination" - I mean, if I'm doing a project, I care about benefits and (my imagined) experiences given by whatever it is that I've built or completed. Journey is just a distraction at best; typically, it's a source of stress and many yaks to be shaved, most of them stinky and ugly. If anything, I get motivation from ways to shorten the journey.
3) Systems are even worse. If journey is just distracting me from the goal, systems are about putting the goal out of mind entirely, automating it away through habits, changes to environment, etc. While probably[2] effective, systems give me zero motivation - they're too arbitrary, generic.
It's a problem that, even in this formulation, I've been trying to solve for almost a decade now. Recently, I've started thinking about what actually motivates me about a project in an ongoing fashion; the insight I had today is that it's a combination of the "project" and "journey" factors:
- The base / fallback motivation is the goal - the benefit I'll get when I reach it. Often, the major one is that someone will be satisfied or impressed. Even more often, it's the relief of getting the consequences of not completing it of my mental threat board, and/or shutting up people who pester me about it. However, that alone is only able to keep the project on my mind; it's not enough to motivate sustained work.
- The immediate-term, ongoing motivation is the journey, or specifically the experience of proficiency, and all the interesting tangents I find along the way. It's a necessary condition for me to stay on the task, but I can't treat it as the main motivation itself - when I try, my mind evaluates the value of the activity as zero and pulls emergency brakes; after all, there are much easier ways to get immediate gratification, and there are more important things to do, so if I don't care about reaching the goal, what's the point of going for it in the first place?
Systems don't even enter the motivational equation here[3].
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that, in terms of motivation, the completion of a project and the journey to it are two different things entirely; treating them as alternatives is a category error.
Also my rambling here is saying that, at this moment, nothing for me has the right combination of "project" and "journey" factors - otherwise I'd be doing something else than writing HN comments.
(And yes, finishing projects completely is hard, because that last 20% of work contains the 80% of chores and annoying tangents that completely ruin the experience of the journey.)
- [2] - Hard to tell, I'm clinically unable to hold a simplest habit to save my life. Forget "it takes 30 days to ingrain a habit" - even after months or years of doing something "habitually", a smallest disturbance to the daily life is enough to undo all that work and get me back to square one.
- [4] - Exception: when I can reframe setting up a system as a kind of a project. Even then, it just makes it easier to build a system; it doesn't help maintaining it over time, which is the whole point of systems in the first place.
> Without the "convenient excuse", the journey starts looking like pure procrastination; how do you enjoy it without the guilt about not doing more important work that leads to more important results?
Procrastination is how I do all my best work. The secret is to set up some boring obligation, bonus points for triviality, and then not do it until the last minute. Meanwhile, work furiously at something else.
> how do you enjoy it without the guilt about not doing more important work that leads to more important results?
This is a serious suggestion: look into therapy to help you examine what and why you think and feel. For example, seeing some things as more important than others (including one's well being) and reacting to the situation with feelings of guilt are not a given.
