

Ask HN: How to channel excitement for new ideas back into the current project? - axefrog

I deeply want freedom. Freedom from having to work for someone else, freedom from basic financial problems and freedom to work full time on the projects I have queued up in various to-do lists and brainstorming documents. To this end, like many of you, I spend a lot of my free time working to build some kind of revenue stream that will allow me to achieve this.<p>Now, I am very good at finding time to work on projects outside of my day job, and I am very good at focussing on that project - for a while. Then I hit mundane parts of the project and the excitement dries up. I keep working on the project of course, but then what happens is something comes along, whether a distracting, time-expensive feature in the project that's not required for launch/MVP, or an unrelated idea altogether, and it starts to steal the available "excitement mindshare" I have. The project then slows to snails pace while I start to try to juggle multiple projects or subprojects, the first being what I know I need to keep working on, and the second existing because I can't get it out of my head.<p>When I try to clear a budding distraction from my head by writing it down, the act of writing it down becomes a days-long exercise of brainstorming that steals from my core development time, self-fuels the fire of excitement about the idea, and that ends up turning into an early-stage prototyping of the idea, further stealing time from what I originally committed to.<p>Excitement about ideas that are NOT what I'm currently trying to bring to completion are deeply distracting and destructive to my productivity. But excitement fuels productivity in a huge way, so how do I take the excitement I'm feeling for a new idea and channel it back into what I'm supposed to be working on? Is it possible to forcefully reallocate that passion to where it's needed most?
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chipsy
I've had some success by attacking this kind of problem from two angles:

1\. Bad prioritization. Changed the way I did my to-do list so that it always
contained more tasks, mixed across all projects, than I could possibly
complete in one month. Then I had to prioritize.

2\. Liking to code too much. I forced myself to slow down and write very
little code - not piling on simple features, not architecting to the moon, but
instead following a more disciplined pattern, as if it were doing exercise -
just immediately going towards very painful parts and getting them out of the
way. Thus, better code, fewer features, less excitement from any one step of
the process, tempering the rewarding feel of early-stage groundbreaking work.
Flow when programming can be a danger zone, it takes you away from the
business goals in short order.

~~~
axefrog
I get very distracted very easily when I'm not in the zone, and when the work
isn't interesting, I find it hard to get in the zone. Maybe it's just a skill
I need to work on.

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jjs
Have you considered that your day job _is_ a revenue stream that lets you work
on the personal projects you want?

If that's the case, then just give yourself permission to make what you
_really_ want to make.

~~~
axefrog
I get what you're saying, but having a few scant hours outside of work doesn't
really qualify, at least in terms of quality of life. I'm talking about
revenue-producing projects that I work on full time, and potentially have
enough revenue to hire one or two others onto as well, and then have free time
to actually relax.

~~~
jjs
I can sympathize. Just don't burn out... let yourself code for fun every now
and then. :)

