More time management woes
I have too many things on my plate right now, mostly self-imposed. And Beyond is probably my biggest project ever. From Paul Graham’s Good and Bad Procrastination essay:
Big problems are terrifying. There’s an almost physical pain in facing them. It’s like having a vacuum cleaner hooked up to your imagination. All your initial ideas get sucked out immediately, and you don’t have any more, and yet the vacuum cleaner is still sucking.
You can’t look a big problem too directly in the eye. You have to approach it somewhat obliquely. But you have to adjust the angle just right: you have to be facing the big problem directly enough that you catch some of the excitement radiating from it, but not so much that it paralyzes you. You can tighten the angle once you get going, just as a sailboat can sail closer to the wind once it gets underway.
If you want to work on big things, you seem to have to trick yourself into doing it. You have to work on small things that could grow into big things, or work on successively larger things, or split the moral load with collaborators. It’s not a sign of weakness to depend on such tricks. The very best work has been done this way.
All too true. Frankly, this project has me scared silly. Doubts creep in all the time. It’s a gigantic amount of effort and I honestly don’t even know if I’m capable of doing it. Yet I cannot give up. The idea is too beautiful to abandon. And I’m blessed (cursed? ;)) with dogged perseverance when I know I’ve got a good thing.
Anyway, because Beyond is so terrifying (to use Paul Graham’s words), I try to find every way possible to avoid actually working on it. :) The number of projects I’ve started since I first got the idea for Beyond is amazing. And yet I know I need to write this program — it’s important. There aren’t any genealogy apps out there with style or taste. Besides, I’ve got ideas that need to be born into reality. So, I’ll do my best to make time and try to avoid avoiding this project. :)
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Ben you are awesome. No doubt you can do this. Remember, if not you then who? And if who, who better than you? (hey I just made that up…i think?)
Thanks. :) I was thinking about this yesterday (being sick all week has given me lots of time to think) and for a few minutes I contemplated abandoning this project. But then I realized that if I don’t do it, nobody will. The other attempts at creating Mac genealogy software have been…well…let’s just say they’re well-intentioned and leave it at that. Now I just need to recover from this illness…