Beating the Burnout Cycle
September 14th, 2007If you are like me, you have a million different things you are interested in, but you never pursue any of them to completion. I float from one project to another as it grabs my interest. This is great for generating ideas, and I think remaining curious is an essential aspect of enjoying life. It’s not so good for bringing projects to fruition.
The typical process goes something like this:
- Get excited about an idea.
- Research the idea compulsively to the detriment of other aspects of my life.
- Work on the project in all of my spare time (and some not spare time).
- Get disrupted, reach something I can’t figure out, or have to deal with real life.
- Become discouraged and try to force myself to work on the project.
- After a few weeks of doing nothing, get excited about a new idea.
It’s a vicious cycle not unlike the problem-solving cycle.
I seem to be doing well on my current project decyder though. I think the difference is due to momentum. How am I creating momentum? Here are three major ways:
The Decision Strategist
This blog is peripheral to decyder, but keeps me thinking about how decision making works in the real world, an idea that is directly relevant to decyder. Though writing for The Decision Strategist takes up a significant amount of time, it keeps me involved and provides an important alternative when I’m sick of working on decyder.
Public Deadlines
The Ycombinator application is due October 11th. I’d like to get a demo of decyder working before then, so I have a very real deadline. Deadlines are great, but hard to enforce without some kind of public commitment.
Making Progress
Making progress is key to building momentum. With past projects I’ve spent an excessive amount of time brainstorming and planning. These are fun activities that get my imagination going, but don’t produce much else. Eventually I lose interest.
This time I decided to basically wing it. Thoughts from Paul Graham, Steve Pavlina, Seth Godin, and others seem to coincide on the value of execution over imagination, so I try and keep my planning to a minimum.
The upshot is that I am accomplishing my goals and feeling less overwhelmed. Instead of having a huge list of tasks, I have only the next few steps. This keeps my goals small and as they say, the thousand mile journey begins with a single step.
Good luck to all of you who are struggling to bring your ideas to life.
-zot
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