
Ask HN: Why can't I get started? - beobab
I have these great ideas. I see something on Hacker News like the 7 minute workout, and I think "I should do an app for that, with little diagrams and a timer", and then I do nothing. I just can't get in front of a computer in the evening and code any more. Then I see that someone else did it already, and I get all knotted up inside. That could have been me, had I actually done something.<p>But even when I know I want to, I can't do it. The knot inside me inarticulately roars at me, and I walk away. I do something else instead. Something which doesn't create anything. I consume. I read. I play games. I read Hacker News on my iPad. I watch TV.<p>If by some good fortune I manage to sit at the computer, I find that I have achieved nothing. I'll have thought "I'll store the data in a database", and then tried to download and install mysql or mongodb, or postgresql, which I don't really know how to use, and I think "I'll write it in python", or "I'll write it in Cocoa for iOS" which again, I don't really know how to use.<p>I need to learn some of these things, but all I want is to get something finished, these things hold me up on things that I know should be almost trivially easy. I've been a Windows programmer for nearly 20 years, but I desperately want to be good on the Mac.<p>I know that if I just sit down for a few hours a day, these things will melt away as I work on them, but I just can't get started.<p>But I can't start. I wish I could. I organise days when I know I'll have no distractions, and then I squander them on worthless nothings.<p>Why can't I start? Any ideas? I have none.
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jlengrand
In the past year and a half, I started at least a different dozen projects.
None of them is finished, or in a "correct" state. I would start something, to
stop it half way through in order to start something else. I would sit on the
computer to work, and start gaming a few minutes later. . .

But lately, within 3 weeks, I popped up my first android application on the
store; without any prior knowledge on database, webscrapping or anything else
I needed to build the app.

The difference? The users. A friend of mine called me saying : Hey, I do that
every morning, and the current way of doing it is a pain. I am sure you can do
something for me.

And magically enough, I got motivated, working my arse off to get the first
version finished. Since it is on the market, I got 60 recurring users and
growing. And this keeps me motivated. I put hours on the project, just because
I get feedback.

So the conclusion: Do something that someone asked you to. Get your users
first, start working afterwards. Don't be alone.

If you don't have users, then join a project that has already started, in
order to code with someone and get some interaction.

I think that for a good 90% of us, what keeps up working is the passion for
solving problems others have.

Hope this helps :)

~~~
GFischer
A bit offtopic, but how did you do the webscraping part?

I'm a bit like the parent, in that I don't commit myself to projects in my
"spare time" (ok, after working 10 hours for someone else). I've been meaning
to build a website for real estate searches (the current local giant has
several usability issues), but I've never gotten to the webscraping part.

I have these 3 in my "to-research" list:

Scrapy

<http://scrapy.org/>

Beautiful Soup

<http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/>

Nokogiri

<http://nokogiri.org/>

did you use any of those?

~~~
jlengrand
BS is awesome, I used it in a former project. Good thing is that it tries to
repair the parsed stuff too. And you'll see that most of what you retrieve
will be broken :).

I currently use Jsoup, simply because I am working in java. It gets the job
done, I got only good things to say about it.

Concerning the real estate thing, I coulnd't agree more. Being a french guy, I
know that all real estate website suck, and it is nearly impossible to have a
way to know all houses to sell in the neighborhood. Some kind of location
based real estate aggregator with links to real estate websites could be a
huge hit IMHO.

Hope this helps

~~~
GFischer
Thank you :) . That's exactly what I want to do, a location-based real estate
aggregator.

I want to add Airbnb-style sliders, and map-based search.

~~~
jlengrand
in which country?

~~~
GFischer
Uruguay. The main website for real estate here is El Gallito by the local
newspaper El País. There's also BuscandoCasas (<http://www.buscandocasa.com/>)
, which is pretty decent but doesn't have map-based search.

I'm a bit worried about legal implications, linking and scraping are not well
seen here.

~~~
jlengrand
Ok.

I got only knowledge of the french and dutch market. The website you gave
seems to be a good candidate for scrapping (simple layout, really
straightforward).

Web scraping is usually not well seen, but hey, if you can help them sell more
/ more efficiently you can make some friends pretty quickly! AFAIK, what is
hugely missing in real estate websites currently is location based search.

Some time ago, I had written some to play around with google maps and say "I
want to live within 30 minutes of this place". If you can link that to a real
estate listing that could really become awesome!

Let me know if you actually start the project :).

~~~
GFischer
Yeah, I probably won't, I have a job opportunity that, if I end up getting it,
will take most of my time and focus for the next 2 years :)

Thank you very much for your advice !! I now feel a bit bad if I don't do this
:P

~~~
jlengrand
Congratulations!

Come on. . .You´ll still have all your nights free! :D

------
IsaacL
There are tons of mental blocks we can have that prevent us working on our own
stuff.

Some people don't have any of these blocks (or at least, none strong enough to
stop them). These people are the ones who say "just do it", because for them,
the only trick is to stop thinking and roll up their sleeves. But many people
can't "just do it".

Some people only have one or two things blocking them. They fix those things,
and suddenly they become highly productive. These are the people who will go
around saying that they have finally found the magic bullet that solves their
productivity problems.

Some people have a ton of mental blocks. Often these are beliefs that work as
cross-purposes.

For example, it sounds like you have the belief "if someone else makes
something that I had the idea for, that's terrible". This pushes the "knot
inside you to inarticulately roar". Trick is it's not that you want to work on
something cool, it's that you don't want to _not_ have worked on something
cool (subtle, but important difference - negative motivation is very poor at
driving creative work).

Another belief is "all I want is to get something finished, these things hold
me up on things that I know should be almost trivially easy". This one is
familiar to me. This conflicts badly with belief number #1, since one part of
your brain is telling you you have to get coding, and another part is flashing
warning bells telling you that whatever you are doing can't be worthwhile
because it's so hard. Result: paralysis.

The good news is you can debug these different blocking beliefs.

I learned most of this stuff from PJ Eby's site: trouble is he uses an
offputting sales-letter/self-helpy language, but the ideas are golden.
<http://pjeby.com/> <http://thinkingthingsdone.com/> are your starting points.
Email me (isaac@i.saac.me) if you (or anyone else) wants to talk more; I'm
thinking of starting a site which communicates some of these ideas.

------
throwaway1979
I feel for you, friend. Some days (weeks? months?) I am in the same boat.
First off, you shouldn't get down because of this. Software is complicated. I
also invested a substantial portion of my career in Windows development. A
younger me looked at Petzold and that that was all there was. How mistaken was
I! Then came MFC, COM/DCOM/OLE, .net, ... I stopped paying attention at that
point. Think about it ... the tech we use changes every 2-3 years. Some tech
ages well. If we had only jumped on Python or ruby when it first came out,
we'd have been gurus now? Would we be as broad today?

I'm actually pretty handy with Python. When a younger me would get depressed,
I'd code to get happy. These days, Python gives me similar happiness. I love
coding that much. Yet, when I had an interview with my dream startup, I froze
up (just as you describe it). The dude on the other hand probably thought,
this guy knows shit. It sucked for a while .. but then I get over it. Just
keep coding, my friend! And stay happy.

------
ArekDymalski
"I've been a Windows programmer for nearly 20 years, but I desperately want to
be good on the Mac" This may be one of reasons. For many people the critical
thing about self-motivation is getting some kind of gratification quickly.
That's why many big projects are constantly started but never finished. It's
their size (and thus delay of gratification) that is discouraging. If I was
you I'd start something what will bring you the gratification in a shortest
time. Start with technology and problem you know. Get the results asap. Then
add a little feature that will require a bit of learning. Just a bit so you'll
be still seeing the results quickly. Than make another step and gradually
increment the difficulty. You'll both learn and get something done. Also, some
usual tips about productivity/time-management (like Pomodoro technique) might
be helpful - they're often based on slicing this big-discouraging project into
small bits where you get the results quickly.

~~~
beobab
For some reason, and despite doing it at work all the time, I never considered
doing any of the "splitting it up into little chunks" work at home. I think
that subconsciously I think I can hold it all in my head in one go, and just
code, but that's obviously not the case any more.

------
dirktheman
I know what you mean. I’ve been there too. I’d have these big ideas in my
head, but never executed on them for reasons unknown. Or I’d write some ideas
down, only to procastinate on them later on.

My solution had everything to do with the proverd ‘The journey of a thousand
miles begins with a single step’. The thing with big ideas (or wanting to
learn new stuff, FTM) is that it’s kinda hard to grasp where to start. Once
you break it down in simple, little steps, your big idea and the way to finish
it will become much more actionable.

Write down your idea, break it down in smaller chunks. The first thing after
that is to know what you don’t know. Educate yourself on those, for instance
with codecademy for everything related to web programming. Once you’ve
mastered that, it’s much easier to see what you have to do.

For your procastination issue, I recommend a time management system like the
pomodoro technique.

~~~
beobab
I think that writing down the idea and breaking it down it the way forward, so
thanks for your help. I appreciate it. :)

------
patatino
I had the same problems. Until I was kinda forced to do a lot of work in my
free time. Well I had to decide, walk away and let three other people down or
just do it. That was the start of a couple of month where I worked every
sunday for 8 hours on the project. For other people this is maybe easy, for me
it was huge.

And the best part was it affected everything else. I started just getting
things done I wanted to accomplish.

I did also some reading about willpower, how it works in our brain and how we
can train it. It's a really fascinating topic and helped me alot.

~~~
santu11
Can you share the stuff that read our willpower? It will be really helpful.
Thanks in advance.

~~~
cotsog
I would suggest the book "The Willpower Instinct" by Kelly Mcgonigal:
<http://www.amzn.com/dp/1583334386>.

You can also look a great talk she did at Google:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5BXuZL1HAg>

In brief: sleep, exercice, healthy food and meditation will boost your
willpower.

Edit: fixed Youtube link.

~~~
ToniVlaic
After reading the post I right away thought about the book "The Willpower
Instinct", great book and highly recommended!

------
andyhart
This sounds like me most of the time...

I think half the battle is just forcing yourself into getting things done.
Usually once you're into a task it's harder to stop than it was to initially
get started.

~~~
beobab
You're right. It _is_ harder to stop, providing no hiccups occur. Once a
hiccup happens, I have to force myself to start again (with the resultant
battle by no means certain).

------
Simple1234
I would hardly call seeing something on HN and wanting to make an app out of
it a "great idea". I would call that, I don't know, not your idea at all.
Windows still has 80% of the market-share on desktop, and soon droid will over
take the iphone market. I think your thinking is backwards on a great many
things. How about you find something you are passionate about, using
technology you are already good at, and then try to "start".

------
smartician
I know exactly what you're talking about.

What helped me immensely: Take a finite, tiny step. Let's say you noticed a
really small bug or even just a typo in your current project. Say to yourself,
"Okay, I'm going to fire up my IDE, find the misspelled word, fix it, and
commit the change. This will only take two minutes, then I can go back to
surfing HN". If you haven't even started yet with your project, just say,
okay, let's set up the project structure. Or even just install the IDE or
whatever. Find the step that appears to be the least intimidating, and just do
it.

More often than not, I then feel, okay, I got the project open, might as well
tackle this other problem that I have. Take the next step, whatever is within
reach. Suddenly hours have passed and I've made substantial progress.

After you do this a couple of times, it will get easier and easier to get
started.

------
neilk
Probably because you're making it a joyless enterprise. You have high
expectations, and you're making it a test of your worthiness as a person. So
even starting to work on it reminds you of many personal regrets. You also
have the problem that you're a very experienced Windows developer, so being a
dummy again with a new topic is painful.

Your body doesn't like feeling that way so it says "nope".

I struggle with this problem too; I'm in a similar situation. But I think I
broke my programmer's block by allowing myself to just do silly little
projects. No big plans or expectations. Like, set yourself the task of
rewriting a small program you did before. Or something small and personally
valuable, even if it just gives you the scores of your favorite team or
something. Think very small, low stakes.

------
shail
Many times I have realized that if you are not able to get something or get
something done, its because you are focusing on it too much. And in such
cases, I try to go for the tangential focus approach. What I mean by that is
that instead of trying to build what exactly you want to build or instead of
trying to learn what exactly you are trying to learn, do something else which
is tangentially related (kind of difficult to explain this though but you will
get it if you get it).

------
momop
I can very well empathize with you. I still don't have anything to "show", but
am slowly making progress. Baby steps. I started with little bit of javascript
and went onto node.js and then setup mongodb. The setup HTML5 + mongodb +
node.js is a fertile playground to get few projects complete.

------
orangethirty
Start with finishing one very small project. Then buikd a bigger one. And so
on.

------
PaulHoule
What do you actually DO with your time?

