It’s Never Going to Be Perfect, So Just Get It Done

You can setup a 'scene' in obs to switch to the other window if you need to, but keeping it focused on your editor/work display really helps those private moments slip to the stream less often.

The problem with procrastination is that it has so many different potential causes and idiosyncrasies that a random advice from the Internet or self-help literature isn't likely to work long-term (once the novelty factor wears off, which for me is usually around a week). The solution really seems to be to keep trying all of the advice, one after another, in combinations and with personal modifications, until something sticks and you start to do better.

For me personally, what seems to have stuck is, in order:

- Doing a "mind dump" whenever I'm overwhelmed by anxiety or confused by what to do. It usually calms me down and clears my head.

- Doing work in pomodoros to reduce the starting anxiety; setting a modest goal of pomodoros to achieve any given work day to consider it a win.

- Most recently, a perverted form of Unschedule. I tried Unschedule and started failing after just 3 days, but I twisted it into the following form: I don't schedule/unschedule anything at all, but just reward myself with 1 point of "guilt-free play" per each 2 work pomodoros completed. I get to spend the points on whatever hobby project or videogame or other fun activity I want, without feeling any guilt or obligation or pressure to do something else. The ratio is somewhat arbitrary (like, e.g., 1 point = 1 flight in Kerbal Space Program), but that doesn't matter. What I realized is that I started to like raking in GFP points, and then spending them in bursts on some projects I previously kept in a "someday/maybe" list. I find myself thinking, "hey, let's work some more, gotta earn GFP points to burn in a couple of days on $project". It seems that I like accumulating them just in anticipation of spending them.

In my personal experience, it flows both ways. It's a positive feedback loop. When I'm productive, I'm happier, even if being productive means meditating or practicing mindfulness (as long as the dread that comes with "wasting time" is not there, all good), and when I'm happier, I can be more productive. The hard part, for me, was getting the loop started, pushing the rock down the mountain, so to say, getting past the first hurdles of procrastination. What helped me was getting professional help and medicine, but I was a pretty bad case.

An analogy I have used to describe this to family before was an internal combustion engine. Normally, once you get an engine started and keep supplying it with fuel, it'll keep generating everything else it needs to keep running. But it still needs a battery and a starter motor to get it running in the first place. Sometimes just getting it running is good enough, and most engines start with one crank, but other times, something is not quite right and it takes a couple of cranks and maybe some starter fluid to get it started. Even once you get it started, maybe the alternator is faulty, so until you get that fixed, you have to keep supplying electricity some other way to keep it running.

You can even make it so that players can't reach the end of level 1 before you've completed level 2 :)

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-184

Then they just kept releasing every week for 7 years, and now you have people building CPUs and explaining Apache Kafka with it.

Ostriv is another recent game that comes to mind as having a similar development cycle. Also many F2P MMOs - most of the non-Blizzard online games I know do regular releases that frequently change the game mechanics (often, to a big player uproar) but still keep their userbase. Fortnight and Pokemon Go are two big ones here.

I'm not 100% on SaaS. Need something more fine-tuned. Call it SaaSGile.

There's an easy way to tell in hindsight whether something was an MVP. Did it get beaten to market by someone who came out with something worse? Then it's not Minimal. Does nobody use it? Then it's not Viable. Do they get bored and move on? Then it's not a Product.

Doing this with foresight, so you're the one who actually puts out the MVP for the market and captures it, is significantly harder. Whoever manages to do that ends up rich, so if it were easy, we'd all be rich. But a general rule of thumb is that if the world is moving on and other people are getting rich while you sit there refining your idea, your idea of "Minimal" isn't actually minimal, while if you're continually pumping out ideas that nobody likes, your idea of "Viable" isn't actually viable.

Similarly, people talk about buying a GoPro and putting footage of it up on YouTube. They don't talk about buying a digital camera from GoPro and putting their videos up on this video-sharing site called YouTube.

Similarly, people Google questions and Xerox pages, they don't search the web with Google and copy documents with a Xerox copier.

Conversely, people stop at the gas station (which might happen to be a Mobil or Exxon or 76 or Valero) in their car (which might happen to be a Honda or Subaru or Ford) on the way to the supermarket (which out here is probably a Safeway, but that varies depending on location). Or they might stop on their way to Whole Foods, which actually did succeed in differentiating, while driving a Tesla.

The customer's mental model is the only thing that matters here. If you're building a car or a skateboard, you're seeking to fit into an existing category in their head. Even if you win (which is unlikely, because incumbents optimize very heavily with lots of resources), you lose, because you're a commodity in a market with lots of substitutes. If you want to actually win - in the sense of create a monopoly product that defines its own market - you, as an entrepreneur, need to be thinking in terms of the overall problem that the user wants solved (transportation, or information access, or answers) so that you can define the terms of the market in a way that you're the only reasonable solution.

The way most startups manage to get big is to fight on ground that big incumbents are unwilling to occupy, while their attention is occupied elsewhere. IBM thought that software was a loss-leader and the money was all in hardware: they came out swinging hard with the IBM PC and eventually dominated the market, but didn't realize that leaving the IP for MS-DOS in Microsoft's hands would be a crucial error when the PC BIOS was cloned. Microsoft knew how to fight on platforms and ended up crushing Netscape, but they had no idea that Google (ostensibly "just a search company") would end up occupying the crucial real estate on the web.

If you have a machine that cures baldness you don't need polish. The knobs can be any color you want and give the user little electric shocks it doesn't matter. Nothing like this exists and potential users really know they want it.

It's true, although they changed the medium: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19960342

> James Clear reached out to the authors of Art & Fear and this is his footnote: https://jamesclear.com/repetitions

> This story comes from page 29 of Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. In an email conversation with Orland on October 18, 2016, he explained the origins of the story. “Yes, the 'ceramics story' in Art & Fear is indeed true, allowing for some literary license in the retelling. Its real-world origin was as a gambit employed by photographer Jerry Uelsmann to motivate his Beginning Photography students at the University of Florida. As retold in Art & Fear it faithfully captures the scene as Jerry told it to me—except I replaced photography with ceramics as the medium being explored. Admittedly, it would’ve been easier to retain photography as the art medium being discussed, but David Bayles (co-author) & I are both photographers ourselves, and at the time we were consciously trying to broaden the range of media being referenced in the text. The intriguing thing to me is that it hardly matters what art form was invoked—the moral of the story appears to hold equally true straight across the whole art spectrum (and even outside the arts, for that matter).” Later in that same email, Orland said, "You have our permission to reprint the any or all of the 'ceramics' passage in your forthcoming book." In the end, I settled on publishing an adapted version, which combines their telling of the ceramics story with facts from the original source of Uelsmann’s photography students. David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking (Santa Cruz, CA: Image Continuum Press, 1993), 29.

>Limiting the amount of review iterations in a unit of work

Fully agree. I think there should only be two iterations max, preferably just one.

>splitting feedback-related work into other tickets

Would never work at places I've worked. The backlog of "important tasks" is never-ending so code cleanups, optimizations, etc. never get done because there is always higher priority work. This isn't really in control of the team because even if the PM agrees to let you lose a week of productivity making the code better without adding features there's a good chance their manager, the engineering director, etc. won't like to see that. So at least in my experience you only have one shot at getting that code in a good state, with the alternative being the code slowly getting worse and worse until it gets so bad you opt for a rewrite or lengthy refactor