Missed My Own Blogging Anniversary

I missed my own blogging anniversary. Does that mean that it wasn’t that important to me or that I am forgetful?

Who knows, who cares.

Do you ever get frustrated with the progress on your projects? I know I do.

Usually my frustrations can be put into the following categories:

• Too many projects resulting in a lack of progress on any
• The initial results of a project are disappointing resulting in abandoning or postponing the project
• Frustration with learning new technologies
• General lack of organization

I haven’t come up with a good way to solve these issues, but here are my thoughts about them.

Limit the Ideas Coming In

Ideas tend to fall on my head like raindrops in an April rain shower. I am in a constant state of inspiration. Whether this is a good thing or not I am not sure, but I have books full of ideas on so many different subjects. I try to let the ideas come as they will and write the down as I can. During the constant flood I select three or four key ideas to pursue, which I have been working on for years now.

My key pursuits are:

• Building Planning Pro (1 year)
• Starting Smush Design (3 months)
• Writing 100 Reasons (3 years)
• Maintaining wbmny (1 year)

Any ideas that detract me from those goals usually get benched. Each project is a full time activity and because I rotate between I don’t make much progress on any of them.

Planning Pro (PP) has been a key focus for a while now because once it is finished it will help me to organize the rest of my pursuits and possibly provide some income. Unfortunately, with PP I have allowed myself to become side tracked by switching the source code from php to ruby. I am happy about this, but it means all the time I spent learning php is wasted (in a results sort of a way).

I believe the solution to this problem is to be more diligent about my progress on these activities and then follow through, which also relates to the organization bit.

Dissatisfied With the Results

Being result oriented is definitely my theme for this year. Unfortunately, most of my personal projects have poor results. If I was to evaluate my ROI on all of the above projects I would dump them all. I have spent years now investing in these projects without any return at all.

In a personal way it is important to be more realistic in this respect. I need to really decide what these activities are really worth. I enjoy them because I want to spend my time doing something productive (rather than watching television). The real problem is that I do want some solid results from each project and I am not getting them.

Technology Frustrations

I am really in love with technology and I consider myself as an early adopter, from the iPod to Rails I usually get in pretty early. The cost of this however is quite high. Not financially, but time-wise. For example, I started getting into Linux and it really took up a lot of time with absolutely no result.

I think Debian with KDE is really great, but in the end it takes so long to learn how to do things with no result.

A better investment is with rails. I am really happy with ruby. Learning the is very difficult, but I am really speeding up the development of PP vs. php. However, I get so frustrated because the authors can build such a great structure and then do such a shit job of documenting it. Making the ramp up time longer than is necessary.

In the end it just comes down to being careful with what you want to get out of a technology and trying to see what kind of gripes people have about it before digging in.

The Art of Being UnOrganized

Finally, the real killer for me. I think I am the most organized unorganized person I know. As an example, most of my colleagues desks are either clean or cluttered. My desk on the other hand is cluttered, but it takes me really 10 minutes to get it very organized. So I always wonder why I don’t just keep it clean.

It’s the same with my projects. It didn’t take me very long to get organized because I keep things pretty straight in my head. I have always felt I have a strong talent for that.

For example, I can read really a lot of books at the same time and even if I only have 10 minutes to pick a book up I can remember where I am at in the book, not the page number, but the point of the author up to that point. With my projects I can pick them up and know right what I need to do next, but in all the details I quickly loose site of the result.

The solution here is maybe more trying to keep focused on the results that I want. I suppose being organized is just a matter of noting your focus and then following up.

In the end I think these things will continue to plague me, but I need to be aware of them and fight them.

I guess we’ll see.