[extropy-chat] Personal effectiveness

[Hal Finney]

David Lubkin writes:
> I put substantial effort into a project but move on to something else 
> before there's a payoff for the effort.  Sometimes I can eventually get 
> back to it and pick up where I left off.  Sometimes everything I did was 
> ultimately pointless.
>
> When there's external pressure, I force myself to concentrate and 
> finish.  When the task is one I've just set for myself, I don't.

It's hard to give advice without knowing more about the kinds of projects
you work on, but I have a couple of suggestions.

I sometimes work on small software projects, with the idea of eventually
releasing them in some form, but I never get them finished to the degree
that I am comfortable putting them out.  The work ends up being basically
wasted.

One thing I am trying is to put them onto sourceforge.net, an online
repository for such things.  I work on them there, put some documentation
in as I create it, and if I stop working on it for a while, so be it.
At least it's there, and in principle someone could come upon it and find
it and maybe it would be useful.  It's better than having it sitting on
my disk where no one will ever see it.  And since this site is designed
to hold projects that are in development and unfinished, I don't feel
pressure to make it perfect.

I'm not sure how you could generalize this idea to other kinds of
projects, but maybe there would be some possibilities.  For example, if
you were doing woodworking, you could take a class at your junior college
and bring your projects in and work on them there, rather than at home.
Then you'd be interacting with other people and get some feedback.
You might be more likely to stay engaged and get it finished, but even
if you don't, at least other people will have seen your work.

Another idea which might be more generally applicable is another principle
from the open source software world: release early and often.  The idea
is to set milestones and incremental targets which can be met easily
and will still represent tangible and useful progress.  In other words,
you would divide the project into pieces that you can complete in a
manageable amount of time, and have something useful as a result.

Even for something as mundane as, say, cleaning out the garage, if your
garage is like mine this is a multi-week project and it won't happen.
So you set a smaller goal, of doing just a portion of the garage, just
one wall or set of boxes.  And try to identify a series of goals, each
of which is doable and represents a significant step forward, but which
won't require huge amounts of time.

Another idea that works well with this is, if you do abandon a project,
try to leave yourself enough notes and documentation that you will be
able to pick it up again in the future.  Write down all your thoughts
about what directions you thought you might go with the project, or
different avenues you had intended to explore.  Especially if you have
broken the project down into units, then you may well find that at some
future time you will find your interest in an abandoned project has
returned, and these kinds of notes will help you get up to speed quickly.

A final suggestion is to try to think of your projects in a more
open-ended manner.  In many fields, your projects will never really be
completed.  You can always tinker with them and improve them.  And even
if you finish one, when you start another it can often be thought of as
in some way a continuation of the preceding one.  In this sense, you
should think of abandoned projects as lying fallow, until inspiration
strikes again and gives you the energy to carry them forward.

Trust that this will happen eventually.  Think of all your projects
as life-long endeavors, with different ones active at different times.
Then you won't get so hung up on which ones are finished.  Think of them
all as constantly being works in progress.  By applying these other ideas,
you can still arrange that these unfinished works can be of value to
others, so you won't have that guilty feeling of your work being wasted.

Hal