Progress, not perfection
I do too many things, so I stopped trying to finish something every day. Sometimes progress is just kicking the can a little further down the road.
do too many things, and people occasionally point this out as if I haven't noticed.
I write, design, build software, study languages and start projects with alarming ease. My attention moves around, things get left unfinished, and for years I thought the solution was discipline: focus harder, prioritise better, finish one thing before starting another. All the sensible advice given by people whose browser apparently has three tabs open.
It doesn't work particularly well for me.
So I've adopted a smaller rule: kick the can down the road.
Every day I make a list of things I want to move forward, without requiring myself to finish any of them. A paragraph written, a function fixed, five words learned or five minutes spent reopening an abandoned project and remembering what the hell I was doing all count.
Usually kicking the can down the road means avoiding a problem. I mean it almost literally. The project doesn't need to arrive anywhere today; the can just needs to end up slightly further down the road than it was yesterday.
Set the daily bar low enough and you can keep the yearly bar surprisingly high.
Sometimes this feels less like kicking and more like dribbling. A touch here, another there, a change of direction when something interesting appears, then back to something I left weeks ago. From above, the route probably looks ridiculous. That's fine. Dribbling isn't inefficient because the ball doesn't travel in a straight line.
Neither does curiosity.
I like starting things
Starting things gets a bad reputation, and I have plenty of evidence for the prosecution: unfinished software, unfinished essays, half-learned technologies and directories whose names suggest a level of ambition their contents currently fail to support.
But I don't necessarily consider them failures. I think of them as doors.
Once you've started something, you have somewhere to return to. Six months later, something learned while apparently being distracted by an entirely different project might turn out to be exactly what you needed to continue.
Not every door needs a fucking business plan. Some are worth opening just to see what's behind them.
Making things is thinking
This is also how creative work actually happens, despite the neat little diagrams we make afterwards to convince everyone there was a process.
You write something bad and discover what the better version needs to say. You make the wrong layout and finally see the right one. You follow an idea too far and realise the interesting part was something you passed along the way.
Software isn't very different. You build something, discover that your assumptions were wrong, break it, understand it better and change it. The prototype isn't merely an unfinished version of the product; often it's the thing you needed to build in order to understand what the product should be.
Perfectionism wants the answer before you've done the thinking.
Fuck that.
Some days you run. Some days you dribble around three completely unrelated projects. Some days all you manage is to kick the can another five metres down the road.
Five metres still counts.
The goal isn't to win Tuesday. It's to keep enough things moving that, when you eventually look back, all that supposedly unfocused movement has taken you somewhere.