November 2nd, 2007 by Jemaleddin Cole

I’m sort of par­a­lyzed right now by the number of poten­tial projects on my plate. I have a site that I promised I would build for Kellie, a site that I need to design and write for myself, and a new pro­gram­ming job I’d like to pitch to another site. Sadly, I’m not really moti­vated to do any of them.

The job for Kellie is a women’s health site that will be a nexus between social net­work­ing, health man­age­ment and med­ical resources. It’s very ambi­tions, but there’s so much to do that I don’t know where to start. Kellie wrote me about 6 dozen pages of require­ments, which is good, but it’s a bit overwhelming.

The site I want to write is another med­ical resource site based on my expe­ri­ence with Jared. I’m ready to do it, and I’m pretty sure I know what I want to say, but there are a lot of freaky people out there, and I’m not sure I’m in a place where I want to deal with what will happen if they find the site.

The last one is actu­ally a minia­ture vari­a­tion of a site I worked on last spring, but more focused and yet more gen­er­al­ized. I’d like a way for a cer­tain breed of small web­sites to be able to add a social ele­ment to their sites with­out a lot of work, but the idea I have in mind will com­bine a data­base, some PHP and a return to Flash. And that’s espe­cially overwhelming.

So I’m hoping to get myself moti­vated - do any of you have any rec­om­men­da­tions on self-​starting?

6 Responses to “Lots of Good Ideas”

1. K.I.S.S.

   Keep it simple, silly.

   Don’t over think it. Just start writ­ing code. The rest will take care of itself.

   — C.S. Ritchie November 2nd, 2007 at 9:08 pm #

2. Take it from some­one trying to com­plete too much with too little, I am the most pro­duc­tive when I focus on indi­vid­ual por­tions of a project, rather than the project as a whole. Even then, I still find myself get­ting over­whelmed with the scope of it. Then again, I am my own worst enemy in that regard. As you’ve stated on mul­ti­ple occa­sions, I am the king of over-​complication. I think the trick is just to find some­thing that you want to do for fun. As soon as the project becomes a “have to”, it changes your per­spec­tive dra­mat­i­cally from one of casual enter­tain­ment, to a second part-​time job, and a good por­tion of your moti­va­tion goes out the window.

   — jet November 2nd, 2007 at 11:32 pm #

3. The above advice is excel­lent. Here’s what I do. I break each project into sev­eral smaller spe­cific tasks. They shouldn’t take much longer than an hour to com­plete. They have to be focused. Tasks that are too gen­eral are won­der­ful ways to waste time. If I do a good job at this most of the tasks can be done in any order. Then I work on whichever one strikes my fancy each day. With three projects there may be tasks that are very sim­i­lar between the projects. Some­times I can do one and actu­ally be mostly done with the other two. That is all very help­ful. I helped Colin do that with his thesis. When­ever he got stuck with one task he switched to a dif­fer­ent one. He was over­whelmed with the size of the thesis and was trying to work it in the order that each piece would come in the writ­ten prod­uct. When he hit a wall in one place the whole project came to a halt. But with the thesis broken into smaller parts he could just jump to another one and come back to the tough one later. That way he was able to get some­thing done every time he sat down.

   That’s #1.

   #2 is to work on the project(s) for a set amount of time EVERY day, say one hour. Sit there for the hour whether you are pro­duc­tive or not. This where C.S. Ritchy’s advice comes to the fore. Write even if you have to throw it away later. Noth­ing hap­pens if you don’t get started. Even if you are just noodling it’s pos­si­ble you can sur­prise your­self and come up with some­thing.

   #3 is to make your­self a list of rewards for com­pleted tasks. Rewards are only enjoyed when a task is com­pleted. For exam­ple, if you were a choco­holic you could eat choco­late when a task was com­pleted but not at any other time. If you have a favorite TV show you have to earn the reward in order to watch it. Per­haps it’s a favorite restau­rant, movie, other hobby, and what­ever.

   These are the sel-​taught ways I’ve always worked whether it was a writ­ing project, plan­ning, gar­den­ing or some­thing else.

   Hope this is help­ful.

   — skank November 3rd, 2007 at 8:20 am #

4. Well, good advice all around - you guys should col­lab­o­rate on a book. I’d help, but I’m kinda pressed for time with all these projects… Thanks for the advice, fellas.

   — Jemaleddin November 3rd, 2007 at 7:59 pm #

5. Go to a masseuse, grab a beer with the buds, watch some MMA, maybe watch a movie, play some PSP, take the kid­dies to the park, buy the wife some roses, feed the cat (or inspect rear ori­fice, what­ever the case may be), relax for a whoooooooooole day, and then do what these other dudes said and buckle down to do what needs to be done. :) (plus, don’t be afraid to ask for help!)

   I am very excited to see all of the out­comes - all of them are equally thrilling to me. You are one great dad & hubby. :))

   — CanadiensFan November 4th, 2007 at 7:31 pm #

6. And you’re way too com­pli­men­tary, lady!

   — Jemaleddin November 5th, 2007 at 6:46 pm #