3 ms·
As someone who has had the same attitude in the past, working full-time on one thing at a time that eventually went nowhere, I'm beginning to think of side proj
by kranner 16y ago
As someone who has had the same attitude in the past, working full-time on one thing at a time that eventually went nowhere, I'm beginning to think of side projects as insurance.
Perhaps it is more fruitful to think about how to work more efficiently in the present and track potentially good ideas for the future, than to keep throwing them away.
- ryanwaggoner 16y agoThis is how I previously thought, but I've since reconsidered. The reason is that you can't split your attention between multiple projects without a loss in overall efficiency. The amount of attention given to each of n projects isn't 1/n, but rather 1 / (n^x), where x is some measure of how bad you are at multitasking. For me, I think x is probably somewhere around 1.5, so if I have three projects, I end up giving each an average of 20% of my full attention. The remaining 40% is lost to the ether due to distraction, task-switching costs, and not having one project constantly be the main thing on my mind. As a result, increasing diversification results in a lower overall expected value of your projects, because you're losing more and more of your productivity to efficiency losses.
- kranner 16y agoWe might be thinking of different time-scales. I've probably never worked on more than one thing on any one day, but if I had to do the same thing every day for more than a month I'd be bored and dragging my feet eventually.