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Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

As someone who often has multiple meat-space projects in flight, I'm convinced there's a very thin line separating busy creative types having lots of physical projects taking up space and any other kind of hoarder.

Whenever I'm getting ready to push through another phase of a big project, or just getting started, the necessary accumulation of materials and tools makes it especially apparent. It's just a small loss of motivation, distraction, or injury away from becoming another burst of hoarded expensive junk.

Consider yourself lucky your project messes can hide away in a NAS...

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As someone who has a bunch of projects and knows a couple people who have borderline hoarding problems the line is thicker than you make it out to be.

It's all just personal experience, but it's quite easy to move from "having hobbies" to "collecting hobbies". Speaking from experience here, the difference between me and my father (who do this) and my brother (who doesn't) is stark.

Perhaps, but I'm constantly reminded how trivially my personal situation can become indistinguishable from that of any other hoarder should my discipline to finish what I've started wane.

I think anyone who takes on large costly DIY projects taking months to years for completion can relate. Sometimes I feel the only thing driving me to finish some projects is the fear of falling into a hoarding pattern while I tell myself the project is just on the backburner. If I became comfortable with letting outstanding projects enter a backburner mode indefinitely, it'd just be mental gymnastics enabling hoarding IMNSHO.

Edit:

I'm reminded of an interaction I had recently with customer service @ Home Depot, while I was returning some unused tools and materials for a project I changed directions on and no longer needed.

I'd mentioned to her how close I'd come to just keeping it all instead of returning, despite not needing any of it now, since it wasn't a large sum of money. But that a fear of becoming comfortable with such a rationalization to not return things would just enable a form of hoarding.

It apparently struck a nerve as she entered into some kind of confession mode. She enumerated a bunch of projects she has bought everything needed to do from tools to materials, sitting collecting dust for years, and never finds the time to actually start, let alone complete.

I found this video by Zach Freedman about finishing projects to be enlightening, especially the idea that "deciding to not finish a project" is a way to finish a project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1j93RnIxEo

I've hauled around custom pcbs and torroidal transformers through like 15 different apartments. It was for an old audio amplifier project ('dx blame' i think). Someone on a forum sent me his 'favorite' mosfets and the pcbs from germany. Seeing them when moving reminds me avoid physical DIY projects unless simple stuff for outdoor rec.

Eh. I'm a scale-model builder, and that community is full of people who build amazing models...but even more full of people who just collect kits. Kits that they'll build "someday."

The existence of dissimilar extremes doesn't prove that the line in the middle isn't thin.

For programming projects, I personally find that the ritual of setting up all of the infrastructure is very likely to distract me from actually building the thing.

I can be obsessive about doing things the right way, but my most successful projects have always been the ones where the code looks like I dragged it kicking and screaming over the finish line and the infrastructure is basically nonexistent. And sometimes I clean it up afterwards, once I am motivated by the success of the project.

By infrastructure I mean things like CICD or even tests. If I have to choose between thorough testing and being able to finish the project at all, testing can wait.

I can relate and I think that's because with the projects that I'm most passionate about, I can't wait to set up the infrastructure and do it right. I want to do it now! But generally, if there's a project that I'm struggling to find motivation with, I'll start the long process of setting up the infrastructure, hoping that I'll get motivation in the meantime and it sometimes helps a little but often it just ends up with me constantly pushing it back.

> If I have to choose between thorough testing and being able to finish the project at all, testing can wait.

The way I look at it, you can't test anything until you know what it's supposed to do. You won't know what it's supposed to do until it's at least close to being done. No sense in testing until you get there.

If you want to have a head start on testing, making sure to write your code so it's easy to test is probably fine, even if it's not what I'd choose.

I've watching this video multiple times now to keep me in check.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1j93RnIxEo

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