Just Do Something

At any point in time, I will have about five or six hobby projects in mind that I want to start. These projects range from some medium-term programming endeavour to writing a book on some aspect of theoretical physics. Their defining characteristics tend to be the requirement of a vast quantity of time and patience to complete. I consider myself a generalist, so this constant stream of ideas suits me well. Execution of these ideas is another matter, however.

Whenever I have a spare moment, which invariably coincides with evenings and weekends, I often find myself overwhelmed with choice about which idea to pursue. This leads to a form of "procrastination paralysis" where I will want to achieve more than is possible in the timeframe, usually bringing on a sense of deflation. I decided recently that it was time to eliminate this problem.

My first attempts involved listing everything that I could possibly do at that time. Then I would proceed by removing the projects I could least be bothered with. After a few iterations I would be left with one or two tasks and I would just pick one. As you can imagine, this did not instigate any real sense of enthusiasm and I quickly continued with the procrastination. I began to consider the fact that I wanted to begin so many projects as a very mild form of attention deficiency. The fact that I would "lose out" by not concentrating on projects B, C and D if I carried out A irritated me and further compounded the procrastination.

Upon further reflection I determined that the problem was not due to the overwhelming nature of the quantity of ideas, but rather that I possessed deep enthusiasm for all of them. Beginning project A made me realise that the enjoyment gained from it is completely orthogonal to the enjoyment of B, C and D, apart from the blatant zero-sum time issue! It is obvious in retrospect, but now I look at the choice as a positive aspect of my personality. I feel lucky that I am able to attempt so many interesting projects across a diverse range of disciplines.

Currently, I just pick the task that most appeals to me at that instant. Most of the projects are cumulative so I know I can carry on with them in the next spare moment if I choose to do so. Surprisingly, it has helped me focus on completing more tasks if I just get started. This blog post is in fact a realisation of this process. Previously I would be overwhelmed by the time taken to complete a good tutorial article, but this post has taken me less than ten minutes to write.

I'm now off to begin learning some OpenGL programming - a project I've held back from for a long time. Sometimes it is better to just do something!