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This is very true. The only problem with this approach is that you can end up with a lots of "little fish" projects instead of making headway on your "Moby Dic

• philh 16y ago
  If the goal is to cure burnout, that's only a problem if you feel compelled to continue work on the little fish projects. I find that if I get a new project, it tends to push an old one from my mind, so there's not much more mental clutter than before.
  • _pius 16y ago
    I guess, but I was thinking more of the case where you end up in a cycle of constantly taking new ideas and making minimum viable products out of them without developing them (or your big idea) further. Of course, that's a much better "problem" to have than to be mentally constipated for long periods of time without bringing anything to fruition ...
• fleaflicker 16y ago
  I often split my big projects into smaller deployable pieces (e.g., rather than 1 large feature launch, "silently" deploy backend changes first, then expose in the UI). This approach also helps in debugging: deploy and fix each piece incrementally. The only times I've burned out are when working on a massive update without any visible progress. When I finally deployed, I would be overwhelmed with a huge number of bugs to fix.
• anthonyb 16y ago
  Except that most Moby Dick projects started out as little fish - Twitter and Flickr spring to mind.
  • _pius 16y ago
    Damn good point.