Why getting personal projects done is hard

[dcheong]

Some of us are bootstrapping our startups (no investors, no customers yet), while trying to maintain a full time day job. We work hard at your normal job, meeting deadlines and getting things done, but our personal projects fall behind.

One remedy is: Create Self-Imposed Deadlines. With Punishment for Failure.

[DannoHung]

I disagree with this. I think the most important thing is to just work on your project consistently. Whether that means working on it 20 minutes a day, an hour a week, or one day a month for you, just make sure you don't put it aside. If you have to skip one time, don't worry about it, but make DAMN sure you work on it next cycle.

Even if what you end up doing when you spend your piece of time is just some silly project maintenance, that's okay; you're coming back to it consistently and you're making some small progress.

[dreish]

That's been my experience, and in hindsight I realize it's not because the little 20 minutes spurts add up to much, but because they tend to prevent the long, dark stretches of angst and doubt that come from not coding anything at all and having to work up the willpower to start up again. Most work (for me at least) gets done in intermittent bursts of productivity, but by doing something every day I don't have to climb a huge hill just to get to the point where I _could_ have one of those bursts.

[dcheong]

Hi DannoHung,

Thanks for the great comment and I agree with your point. In fact, I experienced the same myself. There have been weeks where I didn't want to look at the code and subsequently nothing got done. There are other times though I fired up the IDE only to tweaked little things like a CSS style or refactor a simple method, only to find I had built up momentum and got lots of little things done.

This however wasn't the point to the article. The point I was trying to get at (perhaps not well), is the importance of setting a penalty when we didn't make a self-imposed deadline. So instead of just spending 20 mins tweaking a CSS, perhaps my time was better spent on the tasks which would actually contribute to the completion of the task. This focus on the end goal I believe can be a powerful force in helping us finish.

I can attest to that as I am the perpetual tweaker. Everytime I look at a site I'm building, I get more and more tired of its look and feel. So before I finish a project, often I'd have switched styles 10 times! For me, having the penalty clause helps me keep in focus.

Thanks for the great comment.

[dctoedt]

I've found it helpful to keep setting a countdown timer for 15- or 20-minute work intervals and 5-minute "goof off" intervals. That seems to be just enough to overcome inertia.

There's a small, inexpensive multi-function timer made by National Presto and available at Ace Hardware among other places - http://www.acehardwaresuperstore.com/presto-4-in-1-electroni...

For Windows Vista sidebar gadgets, there's an online stopwatch that works OK. http://www.online-stopwatch.com/vista-sidebar-stopwatch-gadg...

[edw519]

Thanks, DannoHung. Excellent advice!

I have a buddy who is a professional artist. Of course, he's talented, but he's still just a regular guy. I once asked him how he got so good and successful. "Easy," he said, "I paint every day."

Best programming advice I ever got. Ever since, I code every day.

[wushupork]

I agree. The key is to move forward. The way I see it is that it's a journey, and no matter how long it takes, as long as I put at least one foot forward a day, no matter how small a step, it takes me closer to the destination. I might not get there for a while, but if I stop moving forward, I'm never going to get there.

[triplefox]

For me the most important thing has been stability of time. If I can plan that on any given day, my "usual thing" will be to code a bit in the evening, that's exactly what I'll do - even if I miss a few times. But if I'm getting jerked around by external forces, be they errands, phone calls, travel, etc. then it won't happen.

[ii]

Motivation can be positive and negative. This article suggests that the only motivation that works is negative.

That's terrible advice -- only mediocre things can be created that way. I believe that we should just have extremely big unstoppable desire to build great things, and only this desire should be a motivation for our work if we are going to create something better.

[dcheong]

Hi there,

Thanks for commenting and you make an excellent point. In fact I wrote a little piece awhile ago about how one can overcome distractions and in it I describe there are essentially two motivating factors: one is pleasure and the other is pain.

http://www.davecheong.com/2006/09/13/how-to-overcome-distrac...

The same analogy can be used here. In order to accomplish something important to you (say your startup), you can either increase the pleasure or satisfaction you get when you achieve it, and/or increase the pain associated with failure.

So I take your point about focusing on the negative, but I never claim that "the only motivation that works is negative". In fact I believe both positive/negative and pleasure/pain play important roles as motivators.

Having said all that, don't underestimate the power of the fear of failure/pain/punishment, as it is a major component of the human condition. I disagree that only "mediocre" things can be created out of fear and punishment for failure.

In fact, experienced entrepreneurs will tell you that a "big unstoppable desire to build things" is a terrible thing to build a sustainable business on. Sure, it's great to kick start things, but building a business is 99% hard work. Can you truly build a business on sheer desire alone? What if that desire went away? Ask yourself that question the next time you are up at 3am trying to fix an obscure bug in someone else's code.

Thanks for the great comment! I would love to hear what everyone else thinks also given the diverse background of people here on HN.

[ii]

Hi,

Thanks for the great reply!

The problem is that when you increase the pain, it also limits your possibilities. I do believe in building a business on desire alone and I believe that all great businesses were built this way.

[dcheong]

Agreed to a certain extent. Yes, blindly increasing the pain will limit your possibilities, but appropriate application of it is a good move.

If you're in the planning phase or design phase, you don't want to needlessly time box it and/or punish yourself for failing to meet a deadline, because it will limit what you come up with.

However if you're in the building phase, say all the broad stroke type of decisions have been made and the main task is plain old coding / grunt work, you can use the pain to motivate you from distractions and procrastination.

dave

[ii]

Yes, here I agree 100%. For grunt work fear and punishment are the best motivators. But not everything is a grunt work!

[ahoyhere]

I'd like to know who these "experienced entrepreneurs" are that you are using to appeal to authority.

Are they the same ones who say it's all about passion? Cuz those I can find.

[mojuba]

Just tell me the article doesn't consist of some ridiculously obvious blah-blah on self-discipline before I click on the link.

And then tell me if any one of the famous genius people was not utterly undisciplined. Paradoxically, it is the lack of discipline that helps you think different and create great things, or maybe just interesting things.

[ahoyhere]

Punishment is an awful way to motivate anyone, yourself included. The reason we think it works is because that's how everybody else in our lives treat us: parents, the school system, employers, financial institutions, etc. We get to the point where we think we have to be abused in order to perform, like whipping a dancing bear.

Trying to motivate with punishment leads to value judgment, leads to guilt, leads to mental avoidance.

Avoidance involves much less effort than actually doing the work.

Which is the real reason that it's hard to get personal projects done.

One other reason is that people talk themselves into doing personal projects because they "should," not because they're fired up. And lastly, burn-out from the should-punishment-guilt-avoidance cycle makes it hard to get motivated.

When you get out of this cycle, when you cut yourself a break, when you stop "shoulding all over yourself," magical things can happen... and you can devote regular time to things because you love them, without breaking out the stick or the carrot.

[dcheong]

Hi ahoyhere,

Thanks for the comment and excellent advice. I like what you said and where you're headed and would love to hear from you or anyone out there on what they are doing to motivate themselves to finish their product/service and get to the launch pad.

All I'm after at the end of the day (I assume others are the same), is to find tools we can use to help improve the chances of our startups succeeding.

Loved to hear from the more experienced folks out there on what keeps them going. My article was only intended to help others by sharing what my present thinking is, but if I'm wrong, I'll be the first to admit it and reshape my mental picture.

thanks, dave

[ahoyhere]

Yay, thank you for the rational discussion :)

The question I would ask you, dave, is why aren't you motivated? Why is motivation something that has to be done to you? Why don't you wake up jazzed to do your startup thing, at least a couple days a week?

I had a real awakening when I started to take the guilt load off myself, and started viewing all my actions (or inaction) not as indicative of my worth as a person, but simply choices, which had logical consequences, which I had to either accept or change. Consequences doesn't seem like a neutral term, but I do look at them fairly neutrally, not as punishments for being dillatory.

Not judging yourself is really hard -- from childhood on up we are told "No!" all the time, guided mainly by negative feedback or the carrot (which is attached to the stick), and it is insinuated that our being "lazy" or "unproductive" or "not fulfilling our promise" or "not being where we ought to be by now" is not just a choice, but a sin.

But boy does it feel better when you can achieve a more objective look at the situation.

I surely don't hyperventilate (literally, or psychically) over decisions or screw-ups any more.

When the mood strikes, I blog about these topics here:

http://www.justfuckingship.com/2008/08/letting-go-of-unfinis...

http://www.justfuckingship.com/2008/11/youre-a-terrible-mana...

[dcheong]

Hi ahoyhere,

Thanks for the great feedback - and great blog entries. I see where you're coming from especially if the guilt makes you avoid working on your startup.

For me, it's not so much as guilt. It's more about a question of focus. How does one consider an open-ended task done? Is it when it is at a quality we are satisfied with?

If my startup has 100 bugs, can I say it is finished? I guess it'll depend on the bugs, priority, importance of these bugs and what type of product it is. Early adopters are probably also more forgiving of using a buggy system, so it's probably ok to ship with known bugs.

The problem with time boxing is we allocate fixed amount of time to work on something, but if the time elapses and the task isn't finished, we're likely to schedule more time at it. The problem is without proper focus (maybe being conscious of some reward or penalty) if we're late, we might continue the blow out.

You're right though, as everyone around us is on our back, we don't need us to get on our own backs too! So perhaps, it isn't a black/white situation, but case-by-case instead.

Thoughts?

dave

[ahoyhere]

dave, I think you "just" need to look at the consequences of being late, and what those mean to you, and make the decision on a case-by-case basis. That's more realistic than the punishment anyway. All of life is a trade-off, if you think about it. "If I do it with x bugs, then..." "If we ship before y is done, then..." Then you are prepared for those consequences (or not). That tells you whether to keep going.

But I'm in the corner for shipping earlier. For our app, Freckle Time Tracking, we got the time entry interactions really, really done well, but the rest was very beta/alpha. We decided that we wanted to focus on the single biggest, most important interaction. We're still polishing the rest.

It is, of course, an unending task, but you have to use logic & foresight to decide where the intermittent goal posts are.

Creating a punishment for yourself for going over a timebox is not gonna do that hard, human thinking for you :)

[dcheong]

Hi ahoyhere,

Thanks for the advice. I'll digest your comments and see what bits I can tweak. Hopefully, the end result is I get to ship soon!

BTW, freckle is a nice app. It helps to have have legendary Thomas Fuchs et all on your team.

Love it if you and team can evaluate my app for me?

dave