[HN Gopher] Choosing SOFA
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       Choosing SOFA
        
       Author : dredmorbius
       Score  : 23 points
       Date   : 2022-07-02 12:04 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (idiomdrottning.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (idiomdrottning.org)
        
       | pphysch wrote:
       | There are so many reasons to start a project:
       | 
       | - to make money
       | 
       | - to meet a requirement for work or school
       | 
       | - to learn
       | 
       | - to augment your portfolio/resume
       | 
       | - to pass the time
       | 
       | ...and actually "finishing" that project only serves a subset of
       | those. It's important to keep your motivations in mind rather
       | than adopting a "must ship or I've failed" mentality. In
       | particular, learning and SOFA go hand-in-hand
        
       | jstanley wrote:
       | I used to struggle with this, but came to this viewpoint:
       | 
       | Giving yourself permission to stop working on something you're
       | not interested in is the other side of the coin of giving
       | yourself permission to start working on something you are
       | interested in.
       | 
       | I now think it's fine to just not finish things. You're more
       | likely to do something you really care about if you stop doing
       | all the things you don't care about.
       | 
       | OP kind of lamented projects that they gave up on after just one
       | sitting ("on the rare case that I even managed to continue work
       | on a project past one session"). But the opposite of giving up on
       | a project after one sitting isn't "magically completing the
       | project", it's more like "sitting around and watching TV
       | instead".
        
         | dredmorbius wrote:
         | There's a lot to be said for:
         | 
         | - Working with rather than against things. Large problems are
         | best solved by subdividing them into small problems. And in
         | maintaining a constant light pressure over time rather than
         | short-term extreme exertion.
         | 
         | - Seeing activities as serving some purpose. Whether that's
         | writing or reading, undertake the project or book if it serves
         | a need, take it _as far as necessary for that purpose_ , and
         | don't consider the task itself to impose an obligation, _that_
         | comes from the goal, not the methods or journey.
         | 
         | - Having a set of drafts or sketches, or even just a conceptual
         | structure or framework to apply to questions or problems, is
         | highly useful. A Mastodon contact wrote recently of being asked
         | to do a livestreamed presentation with no prior warning. There
         | are a few possible responses (a hard "no", or converting the
         | session to a Q&A or panel, say), but one option is to have a
         | set of not-entirely-completed drafts which might be pulled out
         | and deployed in such cases.
         | 
         | (I suspect that this is the basis for a large number of invited
         | or commissioned works in literature, music, drama, etc. Have a
         | set of pieces which can be rapidly assembled to create a
         | serviceable whole.)
        
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       (page generated 2022-07-02 23:02 UTC)