The Important Habit of Just Starting
lifehacker.com
lifehacker.com
But for more general things in life, "Just Starting" can just add anxiety and clutter to your life.
My wife is the chronic example of this. She is a "chronic hyperactive starter", she starts multiple house chores and tasks and leaves them all half done. Over her life she has started multiple courses she didn't finish. Our house is packed with little half finished handy-craft projects tucked inside bag after bag. In the kitchen there are often half washed dishes, in the bathroom half washed clothes lying around. She is not untidy at all, she prizes cleanliness and method like a lot other people do, but she just cannot manage the anxiety of a "to-do" list.
In order to feel active she must start all that is not done yet, but somehow then abandons the task to start another.
Mainly my house work is going around the house picking up her half finished tasks and finishing them.
Just to give an alternative view... the habit of just starting is only at best 50% of getting things done, and many times it's not even the hardest part, the hardest is finishing things.
Isn't she just preventing a pipeline stall?
Not all projects are worth finishing, but I find that once the rush of learning new things have worn off and the only thing left to do is rigorous evaluation or polish my desire to work no it fades.
I find tying some reason to finishing them usually gets me more willing to do so. Giving presentations about my work has often served as a good forcing function since they have due dates associated with them and the fear of being embarrassed by my work outweighs the boredom of doing the last ~20%.
Not a panacea, but it helps me.
Combine a vague spec ("Not now kids. Daddy's working on a better Snapchat!") with design-it-while-I-code and you end up with a transporter accident.
This spreads out the tedium. I'm not spending 10 hours in one go completing something: I'm spending a couple of hours on it, then moving to a different piece and a different task.
When I'm in a good flow, it works out really well. And sometimes I find I finish a few projects in a short time.
Once you have the book schema in hand, you then diff against your prior knowledge to determine a topology of value relative to your goals (which of course vary with time). Then you perform a non-linear reading of the parts of the book which are sufficiently new/relevant for your goals. You can always return to a different part of the book later, if your goals change and you recall the schema.
This also applies to other media, e.g. video, which can be accessed via non-linear hypertext index. What we are missing is a commercial market for metadata to faciliate non-linear learning, dynamically mapped to ever-changing user goals by navigational interfaces.
Anyways,, I recently came across How to Be an Imperfectionist: The New Way to Self-Acceptance, Fearless Living, and Freedom from Perfectionism by Steven Guise[1] It's been very helpful in making aware of the challenge I have and how to work on changing how I think about things so that I stop worrying about results and focus more on process (and progress, the results will eventually come).
I've realized I was/am a perfectionist but I didn't really realize how destructive it is. It leads to paralysis analysis, extreme fear of failure and thus "freezing" and procrastination. I've been contemplating doing a write up on these issues and throwing another one in the mix [pornography] but I'm still letting my perfectionism hold me back (I want the write up to be "perfect").
Anyone else relate?
Once you've kicked that, then you need advice on how to finish projects you've started. In that, the anxiety of something completed is near-zero, while the anxiety of something half-done is clearly higher. Additionally, the sense of satisfaction of something completed is amazing, to the point that it often inspires people to do even more.
There seems to be many, many points along the way someone can get stuck, but by far the biggest one is the first one: so just start. Then deal with overcoming obstacles along the way. Then deal with finishing what you started. Then deal with accepting "good enough," rather than perfection, and put it out there. And then don't rest on your laurels, but start either something new, or the next iteration of what you just put out there. Repeat as needed.