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At the same time, I look back on how much time I wasted by constantly moving the goalpost for any given project, or even about what projects I should spend my t

At the same time, I look back on how much time I wasted by constantly moving the goalpost for any given project, or even about what projects I should spend my time on. And a ton of this was due to me worrying about how to make money, and which projects would make the most money, and all kinds of useless questions like that. But historically, the projects of mine that got the most positive feedback and have the most users, are ones I did purely because I wanted to, because I saw a need and knew how to fill it and knew it would be an interesting and satisfying challenge. So the other night I decided to go back to that. I've got a super cool new app that will make Mjolnir/Hydra/Phoenix/AppGrid look like stone age tools, that I plan to dedicate serious time to. I've also started re-typesetting a very fascinating public domain book printed in 1885, which I found on archive.org, and got Tesseract to do most of the work for me last night in about an hour flat. So yeah, I can get a lot of really cool stuff done in a very short amount of time, as long as I stop worrying so much about how things will be provided for me and trust in Divine Providence to take care of that. That's how all those other cool projects were made anyway, so I have even more evidence against my worrying and overthinking it.

itronitron 8y ago
Same, the course I took in college 'just for fun' ended up being how I got my first real job after graduation. And I did my best work for my previous employer when I deliberately focused on satisfying my own curiosity.
annywhey 8y ago
There's a lot to be said for a "keep moving" approach to project work. I'm a worrier with a perfectionist streak, but I do better with multiple projects because I ruminate less on each one: If I cycle through them over the course of a day, I forget what I was worried about and just focus on accomplishing something I had put in the to-do, which levels things out and lets me do more work at less than 100% when it's called for. When I do work at 100% it means I'm destroying myself trying to calculate every possible option. The 100% work only needs to come out some of the time.

itronitron 8y ago

Same, the course I took in college 'just for fun' ended up being how I got my first real job after graduation. And I did my best work for my previous employer when I deliberately focused on satisfying my own curiosity.

annywhey 8y ago

There's a lot to be said for a "keep moving" approach to project work. I'm a worrier with a perfectionist streak, but I do better with multiple projects because I ruminate less on each one: If I cycle through them over the course of a day, I forget what I was worried about and just focus on accomplishing something I had put in the to-do, which levels things out and lets me do more work at less than 100% when it's called for. When I do work at 100% it means I'm destroying myself trying to calculate every possible option. The 100% work only needs to come out some of the time.