October 8, 2017

Momentum

I’ve found that momentum in my side projects is easy to gain and easy to lose, especially for a project like Buttondown where there are a bunch of things that I could be doing on it.

(And when I mean a bunch of things I mean that Buttondown currently has 74 open issues on GitHub, all neatly organized into “marketing” and “technical debt” and “features”. …Okay, and “bugs”.)

When things are slow, things tend to get slower. I fall into a trap that looks something like this:

1. I put two or three todos for Buttondown on my todo list for a day.
2. They don’t get done. Maybe it’s because I had a busier day than I expected; maybe it’s because I underestimated the scope of work; maybe it’s just because I was feeling lazy and wanted to just play Overwatch after work.
3. I feel bad about this, so I add another item to the list to try and make up for it the following day.
4. That doesn’t work.
5. I add another item, and now the scale of what I need to do intimidates me.
6. I delete the entire list in a fit of frustration.

The friction of going from “not doing a thing” to “doing a thing” accumulates over time and it accumulates quickly. The only way I have to break the spell is to find the smallest, easiest, most technically insignificant change I can think of and then do that as soon as possible, and nothing else.

I still end up putting that tiny little task off until the end of the day, but when I do it I am always pleasantly surprised at how easy it was. And then I can take on a slightly bigger task; and a slightly bigger task after that; and so on and so forth until I’m in a rhythm again.

I’m finally in a rhythm again with working on Buttondown after a week or so where I felt too sluggish to do anything of substance, and it feels great. It started with a couple tiny bug fixes (one of them was literally three lines of code), then a small refactor, then a third party library migration, then FullContact integration, and now planning some marketing strategy.

I’ll inevitably slow down at some point: October is a better month for walking than sprinting, and this pattern of ebb and flow is healthier in the long run than trying to be go go go all the time.

Still, it feels good when it feels good.

Three things I really liked this week

1. Roadside Lights, a series of photographs of lonely vending machines in Japan.
2. Naoya Hatakeyama’s series of photographs of underground tunnels.
3. Louise Bristow’s series of Polish kiosks

Happy Sunday.

I hope you have some cider. (Or some soup.)