
Ask HN: How do you retain motivation/knowledge over different projects/fields? - tsar_nikolai
[I will phrase the question from the perspective of a solopreneur, but it is -of course- relevant to many more fields, please mentally adjust the question to your situation]<p>As a solopreneur, you are constantly &#x27;switching hats&#x27; as you perform the various aspects that arise when running a business.<p>When you are building a digital project, there are days that you will find yourself doing various things such as<p><pre><code>  - design
  - development (front-end + back-end)
  - sales
  - marketing
  - administration &#x2F; taxes
  - long term planning
  - customer relations
  - supplier &#x2F; industry relations
  - ...
</code></pre>
and the list goes on and on.<p>And, especially when starting out, this often happens alongside a full-time job or part-time freelance work. (And this is not even taking into account any form of social life, wife and&#x2F;or kids or the struggles with bad family relationships or mental&#x2F;physical health problems that many of us have to deal with.)<p>In practice this variation is awesome. It means that you have the opportunity to develop a wide variety of skills and build broad knowledge. Yet there are often quite big gaps in the time between the application of those skills.<p>For me personally, I find it hard to manage and retain two things between those temporal gaps:<p><pre><code>  1. Motivation&#x2F;Plans
  2. Skills&#x2F;Knowledge
</code></pre>
So, HN, how do you do it?<p><pre><code>  - How do you make sure you don&#x27;t forget what you want?
  - How do you make sure you don&#x27;t forget what you know?

</code></pre>
*[edited for formatting]
======
davidscolgan
For me, being a solopreneur is the ultimate challenge. Can you arrange your
life in such a way to be able to juggle all of the balls you specified? I've
been struggling with the same questions lately as someone doing part time
freelance to fund ambitions of building a product.

I recently read the book The E-Myth, which identified for me a serious problem
I overlooked for a long time: A programmer is a technician who is an expert in
a craft, along with writers, designers, etc. One day the technician is
overcome by an "entrepreneurial seizure" and declares "I do all the work
around here anyway, I could totally run a business better than my boss." And
so the technician goes into business and runs themselves into the ground
because they didn't realize there are actually three roles necessary for a
business to work:

1\. The Entrepreneur, who sets the vision 2\. The Manager, who organizes 3\.
The Technician, who does the implementation

The E-Myth argues that the technician is actually the least important of the
three, and even should eventually be replaced with employees if you actually
want to run a business. As someone who wants to be a solopreneur and stay that
way, my hope is that it's possible to still be the technician, as long as you
can actually balance the other two roles.

As someone with ADHD-like tendencies, I've recently realized that my life has
been in relative chaos for years working for myself. There were no standard
operating procedures since I wanted "freedom" to work how I wanted, but that's
meant effectiveness is directly tied to my mood at the time. I neglected the
Manager's role.

I've also come to see that having a clear "why" for doing what I'm doing is
vitally important at least for me. This is the role of the Entrepreneur.
Otherwise I'll just sit thrashing about with various web frameworks and coding
standards, forgetting that building a product people want is why I'm here.

Working to balance my technician time with manager time and entrepreneur time
has been really helpful for motivation. Procrastination for me seems to come
from being unclear about what I need to do next, and "build product" is not a
good todo list item.

As far as forgetting, Sebastian Marshall wrote a piece called "Background
Ops": [https://medium.com/the-strategic-review/background-
ops-1-str...](https://medium.com/the-strategic-review/background-ops-1-strict-
limit-a520f73e138a). He makes the observation that otherwise intelligent
people will just stop doing things that are good for them for no real reason.
The E-Myth agrees with him here that as much as possible should be put on
autopilot so you can use your limited willpower for creative purposes instead
of deciding what to eat for breakfast today.

I've been mulling on the idea that freedom is not the ability to do whatever
you want to all the time, but rather the ability to decide what rules you will
impose on yourself. I can use my creative energy to say "I have determined
that I do my best work in the morning, so I will wake up at 6am" and then I'll
make my lizard brain wake up at 6am whether it wants to or not in the moment.
The lizard brain often will just go with whatever is in front of it if it can
just get started!

Hopefully this is useful, I'd love to know more about the specifics of what
you've tried and what's worked and hasn't. Great question! I'd also be happy
to chat more over email.

~~~
tsar_nikolai
David, thank you so much for writing such an extensive answer.

It's very interesting to explicitly define those three main roles and applying
them to your own work. I am with you on procrastination (and a lack of
motivation in general) originating from a lack of clarity (or fear).

I think I have implicitly applied the same differentiation by splitting up my
time and work into different projects / categories and explicitly defining the
roles I am fulfilling as described in OP. I often have stretches of the "now
I'm getting my work/life back on track!" feeling where I try to setup the
organisational systems.

    
    
      e.g.
      - Commenting and documenting code as I write it, so that I can get back to it later without any problems.
      - Creating sales and administration procedures.
      - Writing down the most important words from my vision on a sticky note and stick it on my laptop screen.
      - Create daily reflections on my work.
      - Write important notes to my journal 
      - etc. etc.
    

This takes time. All basic things that should be as clearly defined, turned
into processes, and automated as much as possible. This then goes well for a
couple of days/weeks/months.

Then, one of two things happens:

1\. Overall, the manager role seems to be the one that is the first to fail
when -one way or another- the unavoidable shit hits the fan. This does not
even necessarily have to be a bad thing (e.g. sometimes it happens over
spending a weekend 'winding down' with friends or family), but most of the
time it is (e.g. a freelance project deadline taking up 100% of time and
resources, an unfortunate health event in the family, a financial setback from
an expensive but necessary item breaking or a client not paying).

For some reason, returning or recovering from such an (un)expected event that
causes me to lose focus, makes me lose the sight on processes that were clear
before. Trying to put it in your term; _the manager_ is confused and loses
clarity, as a result _the technician_ does not know what to do and _the
entrepreneur_ starts doubting his existence.

And then it's back to square one.

2\. As you continue to work on different projects/fields, technology moves
forwards. And inadvertently, what happens when you spend 5-10% of your time in
a field where 1m+ people spend most of their time, is that technology moves
faster than me. I decide what processes should be, defined them, and applied
them once or twice in a project. What happens next is either, I come across
this great new technology that causes me to want to forget what I know and
apply the greatest newest thing, or I start wondering "did I make the best
choice?", that causes me to re-evaluate my current process.

    
    
      (Or I have been procrastinating the decision of a certain system so long that I eventually just pick one under time pressure. 
      And as I go along the implementation I start to regret it, but it's too late and I tell myself:
      "okay we're going to finish this project in this matter, but next time I REALLY have to make an informed decision!"
      and, of course, the next project it goes exactly the same way...)
    

And then it's back to square one...

I have now decided that this is not sustainable (duh) and I want to know how
others tackle this problem (as I cannot imagine I would be the only one), and
get new insights and/or build the skills and/or tools I need to solve this
problem in a sustainable manner.

I hope this provides a little context on what lead me to ask the question!

~~~
davidscolgan
As far as staying up to date on technology, I am heavily in favor of using
boring technology (see
[http://boringtechnology.club](http://boringtechnology.club)) for my own
projects. The biggest consideration for me is, will this tech still be around
in 5 years, and will it have required me to do a full scale rewrite or massive
breaking changes upgrade?

I've gotten a lot of mileage out of Django for that reason, as even with the
Python 2-3 thing, Django has been very stable compared to a lot of web stacks
I've seen. It's 15 years old, and I fully expect it to still be around in
another 15 years.

React was being adopted by companies when it was still at version 0.12, and
while it did end up staying around, it was not guaranteed. I would have been
hesitant to use it at least until v1.0, and probably would rather have waited
until v2.0.

Now React is the frontrunner and unlikely to go anywhere. They've also
maintained backwards compatibility mostly from what I've seen, as Facebook has
180,000 or whatever odd components they don't want to rewrite.

I wouldn't use Elixir/Phoenix currently, unless it was extremely helpful to
the project, just because it's a less mature technology. It sounds like a
wonderful ecosystem, but if I'm making a business decision, risk is what I'm
wanting to minimize.

This is the biggest reason I was sad that VueJS seems to be flirting with a
large breaking change. I had thought Evan originally said they _wouldn't_ be
pulling an Angular 1 to 2 rewrite the whole framework, and though this doesn't
seem as bad, it still is a different way of doing things.

You know what hasn't changed in 10 years? JQUERY! Ha!

So as far as how I'd keep up to date, my answer is that I'd try to choose a
preferred tech stack that is stable and try to get really good at it. Django
has been the only full stack framework I've needed to learn in my 8 years of
contracting, and that's worked well for me.

~~~
tsar_nikolai
Only just finished reading trough the full talk.

This slide[0] really resonated with me.

    
    
      The new thing won’t be better, you just aren’t aware of all of the ways it will be terrible yet.
    

[0] [http://boringtechnology.club/#85](http://boringtechnology.club/#85)

