Comment by DerekBickerton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DerekBickerton | Hacker News Reader

I think I have Leonardo Syndrome. The Internet being so vast, there's countless things to try out and hack away at, and I have countless unfinished projects hoarded away on my hard-drives. I'm not actually a hoarder in the typical sense of keeping old newspapers for posterity and I'm actually a minimalist, but when it comes to my digital life: the ease of being able to keep mountains of the proverbial 'old newspapers' is magnified a trillion^trillion times.

Leonardo would be paralyzed by the modern web. I find myself also becoming like a magpie, gathering little snippets of code that one day may come in handy, and my bookmarks are overflowing with interesting actionable URLs that I plan to revisit someday. I'm a digital hoarder who likes to procrastinate a lot. Probably need to change that, or is this a natural response to the sheer vastness of the web and the only sane way to approach it?

I could have written the same comment!

I leave incomplete projects when I have gotten what I want from them. Many times it is just for exposure to a library or language or pattern.

I learn by doing so to fully grok something I have to use it which leads to this situation.

Who's to say that the projects are incomplete if you have achieved what you wanted from them? Sounds very much complete to me, even though the final result might not be useful to anyone else.

I do the same and yet I don’t consider them complete. The activity itself is complete, absolutely, but not finishing projects could become a hard to shake off habit. I also agree, life’s short, in the end many learning experiences don’t need to be full projects, some things are good enough and meet their purpose without the need of complete dedication.

See, this is what I do all the time in my free time but nothing is ever good enough to publish because that's never the point and I know that if I do finish and publish something I might be on the hook to support it or for unforeseen misuse. I don't want that liability, but not having projects I've brought to production somehow makes me unworthy of working user stories off a kanban board.

I certainly have it, but I think there are ways to fight back.

Github and strictly source-controlling all my personal projects has done wonders for my progress.

The crappy part still is when you hit a blocker and really have to bust your ass to get through it. The temptation to go sideways and do something else is extremely strong when you don't have a business owner standing behind you.

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