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I had this problem as well. A lot of people do. In a way, it's not a bad thing, if you're oversubscribed it makes prioritizing things a lot easier than if you f
by joeld42 15y ago
I had this problem as well. A lot of people do. In a way, it's not a bad thing, if you're oversubscribed it makes prioritizing things a lot easier than if you feel like you have time to do everything but aren't sure what's the most important.
I am not completely cured of the habit, but what helped me with this -- and more importantly, what helped me actually begin finishing things -- is simply being very careful to only talk about what I've done, not what I'm working on or what I'm planning.
There's this thing called "substitute for completion" where if you talk about some project, even one with hundreds of hours of work remaining, your brain gets the same reward as actually completing it. A smaller dose, perhaps, but essentially the same thing. So your brain figures out that it can just keep coming up with new ideas and telling people about them and it will get an echo of the same feeling of accomplishment as actually doing it, without the hard work.
So what seems to work for me is only talking about my projects in the past tense. When I want to say "I started a new game last week and it's going to be the most awesome augmented reality zombie squirter ever", instead I say, "I wrote a new game event system last week and it turned out pretty good," because that's as far as I got. It's also motivating because I can't wait to tell people about all the cool stuff I have planned, but I have to wait until I actually do it.
I put out a second beta of my current project on TestFlight yesterday. It was a good feeling. It's been a ton of hard work so far. But it's not in the app store yet, so I'm not going to post about it until it is.