[HN Gopher] The Art of Finishing
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The Art of Finishing
Author : emmorts
Score : 130 points
Date : 2024-09-02 20:51 UTC (2 hours ago)
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| btbuildem wrote:
| 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?
| whiterknight wrote:
| 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.
| detourdog wrote:
| Sometimes one needs to reset the goals and failure suddenly
| looks like a success.
| dakiol wrote:
| 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.)
| Swizec wrote:
| > 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.
| sopooneo wrote:
| 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.
| detourdog wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.)
|
| --
|
| - [0] -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Fail_at_Almost_Everythi...
|
| - [1] - Via https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/973029-a-goal-is-
| a-specific...
|
| - [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.
| jdeaton wrote:
| Its not overwhelming clear that finishing is an important piece
| of a _side_ project. Real work at your job is the place where you
| can prioritize finishing over other outcomes. By not forcing
| yourself to finish everything in your side projects you open
| yourself up to greater levels of exploration and learning which
| is, after all, the point of side projects to begin with.
| super_linear wrote:
| Similar to "The Cult of Done Manifesto" (2009)
| https://designmanifestos.org/bre-pettis-and-kio-stark-2009-t...
| wseqyrku wrote:
| I think it's all about prioritization. There are ideas that come
| to mind while implementing something you have in mind that are
| unnecessary right now by some definition (could be infamously
| performance- or perhaps convenience-related). If you have a list
| of all the subcomponents you need (or rather, want to have) I
| think it's healthy to first sit down and triage everything into
| some priority buckets and only zoom in on the absolute base
| functionality first for you to be able to move on to the next
| step on top of it for it to be able to ship. Note that this step
| is completely different in nature than what we have already one.
| After that you can go back and do the next bucket and so on and
| so forth.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Somebody should send it to Neal Stephenson
| xianshou wrote:
| I used to find myself under the effects of this curse as well, so
| I would recommend the author look into _why_ he embarks on such a
| thicket of unfinished side projects. In my own case, it boiled
| down to a mix of several imperfectly aligned factors:
|
| 1. Genuine intellectual interest
|
| 2. A desire to improve particular skills
|
| 3. A vague sense, acquired by osmosis, that industriously working
| on side projects during one's free time is what a Real Engineer
| does
|
| Disentangling these motives and identifying a clear primary drive
| behind each project clears up the "hydra" feeling wonderfully, as
| most of the heads simply disappear once you realize that you
| never had a strong reason to pursue them in the first place. (3)
| in particular is often merely the self-castigating whisper of the
| internalized "should" rather than a valid reason to embark on a
| long and open-ended project.
| alva wrote:
| Just what i needed to read today, thanks.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| The problem is, writing software is REALLY time consuming.
|
| It takes months of full time effort to built something that
| resembles a working application.
| solomonb wrote:
| I relate heavily to the author's dilemma. My projects span from
| math, to programming, to pinball repair, to amateur radio, to
| gardening, to mycology, to who knows what else. I personally
| enjoy the process of bike-shedding and endlessly exploring the
| solution space for a problem. That said, there is a point where
| you need to make hard decisions and button up projects.
|
| As long as I don't care what project gets completed at what time,
| I've found a little trick to broadly move the needle. I jokingly
| call it "Sol's fast five" but the name is actually pretty on
| point.
|
| I take a step back, look around me, and pick out the first five
| things I can reasonably achieve in less then a day prioritizing
| things where I have all the tools and materials at hand. These 5
| things are never entire projects, the goal is to maximally
| decompose the projects until each action is as close to trivial
| as possible.
|
| Once I have my list of 5 things I stop thinking about anything
| else and strictly work towards those 5 goals. There is a sense of
| relief in having reduced the scope and the tasks tend to be
| finished very quickly. Checking them off the list always feels
| good.
|
| Once I have completed my 5 items I start a new list and pick out
| the next five items. This can feel like a huge reward.
|
| I've used this system to great effect in the past few years.
| itqwertz wrote:
| Perfectionism is the enemy of done. It's a good principle to keep
| in mind when you're working on any project so that your valuable
| time isn't wasted.
|
| Sometimes it is fun to explore something and sometimes it's
| better to never start. I have a running list of ideas i will
| never work on until the opportunity of time and savings align.
|
| I'm not sure if it's common but i heard this quote from an
| entrepreneur: "There's nothing worse than a mediocre business ".
| A bad business will die of its own, a good one sustains itself,
| and a mediocre one grinds you down.
| ok_dad wrote:
| I find it's easier for me to finish physical products, like
| woodworking, rather than software. I'm buildings a door right now
| for my patio, and let me tell you that it's next to impossible to
| redo the design of a piece of wood once you've milled it down to
| a certain size or shaped it, so you learn to think very clearly
| about the goals of a project and the design before you cut
| anything. In my off time, I don't want to endlessly struggle to
| finish things, so I don't do software. I also do simracing, which
| also has bite sized goals, like "improve my safety rating to X"
| or "post three clean laps on a new track". Though, no matter the
| hobby, you have to be able to set a small goal and achieve it
| pretty quick, so I'll tell myself "just finish the tenons on
| these frame parts rough, then you can finish them tomorrow."
| goatmanbah wrote:
| When the cost of making a change gets close to zero, it's easy to
| keep fiddling endlessly...
| vjeux wrote:
| Love the illustrations, really great usage of excalidraw!
| fsndz wrote:
| Finishing is super important. Just focus on completing a version
| 0. Then, you can improve it if you feel like it. It doesn't have
| to be perfect, just finished under a reasonable timeframe.
|
| Not finishing and endlessly moving from one project to another is
| bad because it prevents you from making meaningful progress. You
| end up spreading your efforts too thin and never see the results
| of your hard work. This can lead to a lack of closure, decreased
| motivation, and a cycle of unfinished projects that never reach
| their potential. Moreover, without finishing, you miss out on
| valuable feedback and the sense of accomplishment that comes from
| completing a project, which can be crucial for personal and
| professional growth.
| gfody wrote:
| there's probably some cost to having a bunch of unfinished
| projects occupy my mental bandwidth but I think there are some
| benefits: - having unfinished projects gives my
| mind a comfortable place to go think itself out when I'm tired
| and need to sleep. - each project doubles as a kind of
| lookout tower providing some perspective on other related
| projects or relevant technologies, and this keeps me interested
| in paying attention to new developments in non-superficial ways.
| - every once in while a spark of motivation will appear for a
| project I haven't touched in years and it'll be something I
| recently learned backpropagating constructively, tightening the
| whole mess up a bit and helping me retain it all.
| brikym wrote:
| I really like the orientation of that chart. Next time I put a
| long time series chart in a document I'm doing time on the Y axis
| starting from the top.
| blueblimp wrote:
| My favorite blog post on tips for finishing is this classic by
| Derek Yu (of Spelunky fame):
| https://makegames.tumblr.com/post/1136623767/finishing-a-gam....
| psidebot wrote:
| I think it's worth differentiating between personal projects done
| to learn or just for interest, and those that are trying to
| accomplish something. If I do a project for myself to try things
| out and learn something I don't feel any pressure to finish the
| project. Once I've learned something or had some fun, who cares
| if it's "finished" or if anyone else will use it. On the other
| hand, sometimes I'll pick up something interesting that helps a
| friend or family member, or just that I need for myself, and
| there I'm pretty careful about scope. If I can't finish it in a
| couple weekends I'll look for the closest commercial solution
| unless it's a major once-in-a-decade passion project.
| purple-leafy wrote:
| I've mastered this. I've finished 12+ projects in the last year.
| 1 even made money.
|
| How? My projects are tiny. If you're building solo, you have to
| tackle projects reasonable for a solo dev.
|
| I primarily build chrome extensions because the simplest ones can
| be finished in one night, and the hardest a month or two. It's
| frontend only work, so you minimise the project surface area.
| I've only been building them for a year but I finish all of them.
|
| And I focus on getting an MVP out, and only polish if I can be
| bothered.
|
| Now that I've mastered the finish, I'm moving on to different
| projects:
|
| - API only projects - Scripts - NextJS projects (simple backend)
| - static pages
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