What I Learned by Going It Alone | Hacker News Reader

What I Learned by Going It Alone

iancackett.wordpress.com

132 pointsiancackett35 comments

Be Persistent and Keep On Starting

From personal experience, this is the most important thing. There will be days you will keep asking yourself what significance a little thing that you're doing that particular moment has on the grand scheme of things. The reality is that such little things compound over time. The most important thing is to keep persisting. Early on, you will feel like quitting and jumping onto the next big idea/thing, but only with persistence any of them will become fruitful. After you work on a few projects you will be able to interpret the early positive and negative signs better.

Here, here. Last night I checked my commit history for my side-project and noticed I started it over six months ago. There were frequent gaps of up to three weeks with no commits. It was my New Year's resolution to ship stuff, instead of jumping into learning something new every two weeks. Each of those long periods of time could've been a great time to start something new. I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel and I owe it to myself to keep pushing.

I discovered my app involves 15,000 lines of JavaScript that I hand-wrote, and another 15,000 generated from templates. The moment I saw that, I began to realise just how much work I had done. It soon adds up. The light at the end of the tunnel is certainly there, so keep pushing, don't let the fear of how much work it seems daunt you... you'll get there :-)

Thank you. This prompted me to take a look at my codebase. About 20,000 lines of code. I barely knew C++ before I started out. Very excited to note this and a bit more confident now that I am planning on pricing my product.

Yes, thanks so much for this post. The advice is good, but I feel like the best part is just seeing that other people are going through the same things you're going through. 2 months out of my full time job and definitely going it alone off in to the wild unknown here...

If I may add something: don't let going it alone fuck up your relationships. You're wearing all the hats all the time. Something will always be on your mind with your project, and if it's bad or worrying it can really sour things. Bring it up and say "this shitty thing happened today..." or "I'm worried about this..." or whatever, but then be done with it. Air it out and move on.

I suspect it's the reason that I'm single at the moment - lol. Seriously, I live and breathe work, and need to get the balance a bit more, err... balanced :-)

exactly. my girlfriend asked me to agree to finishing at 6 on weekdays, and 2 in the afternoon on weekends. I couldn't believe that would be an improvement... was I really working 7 days a week on my own project? She assured me it was!

One of the posts I can relate to more than most. Can't disagree with a single point, and particularly relate to the point about it getting better with each revision.

It takes longer to go through iterations due to lack of resources, but you have to seriously allocate your personal resources in such a way that you spend more time thinking about what you're going to do before you commit to it than most big companies.

I often will go through entire product designs without even making something because I'll CAD it up on SolidWorks, show it to people, think about it, and not actually invest the money and time in doing it for weeks. That cycle is shorter now that I've gotten better at design and have a larger toolkit to work with, but I'm on version 30+ of my LED lights despite having only actually produced four things I've attempted to sell.

2 things have always worked for me - well almost: 1) listing out the tasks and sub-tasks required for a particular project and crossing them out as I complete them. Then, when I feeling particularly morose about accomplishing "nothing", I check out my list with crossed-out tasks and realize I've completed something after all. Timing/sprints don't work for me. I'll work on a particular task/sub-task until I've reached a good stopping point or until I'm feeling burnt out or I'm bored out of my skull. (Actually, as I'm writing this, I realize Pomodor or something similar is something I should consider for those boring, but necessary grunt tasks.) 2) When I realize I'm actually at or close to completion (and sometimes adding more tasks), I think of the 80/20 rule and ask myself if I would be merely "polishing the apple" if I continued on that project vs. the more substantive work I could do another. Also, if I "complete" a project and it never really gets any traction, I try to think of the lessons learned from it so that I won't feel like the entire project was a waste of time. Admittedly, that last part can be pretty tough sometimes. . .especially if you paid a price in lack of attention on your "day" job, social interactions/occasions/relationships that got short shrift while you worked on the project, etc.

Has anyone else had experience with the Pomodoro Technique? It feels like a way for the website to just sell you books/timers/etc.

I use Pomodoro quite regularly. It works really well in most use cases for me - except when I'm deep into writing some code. I can't get myself to stop after 25 minutes - and then I'm suddenly thrown off my schedule and not managing time anymore.

I haven't really experimented with getting my work pomodoro for more than 25 minutes yet - I think that something like a 45 minute pomodoro may help me for the coding sprints.

You can get a lot done in 25 minutes if you turn off all other distractions and also you know that you will be back with them (email, phone, HN, Twitter etc) after a few minutes.

As far as books/timers etc go, I just use a kitchen timer or my phone or a webapp like Tomatoes[1] and I haven't read any books on it other than the wikipedia article.

[1] - http://tomato.es/

The book is a free PDF on their site and you can use any old egg timer (or any of the number of free pomodoro apps).

It's a fine technique if you're working in an environment where you're free from external interruption, worked very well for me.

I use it frequently, and I haven't had to spend a penny on it. http://e.ggtimer.com/pomodoro is good to help. There's very little technique to it, just work 25 mins, break 5 mins, work 25, break 5, etc. As long as you like.

Free: http://tomatoi.st/

I use it daily.

It doesn't cost anything. You just set a timer for 25 minutes, then take a 5 minute break, and repeat. Take a longer break after 4.

The greatest productivity tool I ever found, for certain types of work.

Here's a variant I used successfully to deal with a complex project that was in danger of ratholing. The concept is "Tabata for work", if you're familiar with the Tabata principles, but it's basically just pomodoro with a twist.

PDF: http://library.crossfit.com/free/pdf/39_05_Tabata_My_Job.pdf

Instead of, say, 20-minutes-on-5-minutes-off-20-minutes-on the same work, the idea is to divvy up a series of tasks and work on each of them for one Tabata sprint. Ten minutes, with five minutes to enjoy yourself between tasks.

Over two hours, you cover eight separate tasks. It's also really surprising what you can get done in ten minutes; send a certain set of emails, review a document, re-work a spreadsheet, test an app. I would not recommend it for coding, for obvious reasons, but if you are in more of a product management role where you are juggling cats and need a structured system to help you deal with all the cats, this definitely worked for me.

It also helped with prioritisation because after spending 10 minutes on each sub-project, it was easy to see what would need more attention that day and have a better idea of how long it would take. The only drawback is that sometimes I really did need a little more than ten minutes (I experimented with some 20 minute blocks, but interruptions became more of an issue).

I think writing (words, code) is orthogonal to time management as a whole. It's task orientated - if you have found a flow or a solution you need to crack it there and then not stop because 25 mins are up.

I can see it working really well for the admin I completely fail to do at work - just 25 mins of focused doing little bits of crap each day would really help - so in fact I might just set aside that time - I will happily down tools halfway through bank reconciliations and it won't break my flow :-)

Thanks Ian - this is a very useful post.

I find Pomodoro to be particularly useful, too. Especially when you're on your own. It's hard to tell people to leave you alone because you're pomodoroing in an office where you may be needed for others things, but at home it's just a matter of making yourself work for just another 20, 15, 10 minutes...

Starting, every day, is a skill worth mastering.... And when you start everyday you will eventually become a master: "Quality is a Habit not an Act."

The best sentence in this post happens to also be the last one.

Thanks... I think it has also been the most important point for me: Just remembering to sit down, and start. And to repeat that whenever the fear of the amount of work becomes too much.

I like it when some of my own thoughts are validated by others. I've been working on a few projects now for the last few months and it amazes me how much better the next on is than the first, like he mentioned in the first point.

The other thing I'll add is that you shouldn't get caught up on having your favorite idea be "the one" and waiting until you're better. Odds are it won't be, and even if it is, you're not going to wreck it if you're a little inexperienced. Just keep plugging away.

Great point, Jack. I suspect my current app isn't "the one", and yet I felt I had learned enough from my time building it that I wanted to share. I'm at the "what next?" stage now, whilst still having one foot in the old project, keeping it going, exploring the possibility that it might still be a good bet, etc. But getting rid of the massive expectation that this will be "the one" certainly helps.

Really useful post, thankyou.

Specifically for me, the part about wrestling with focus... I tried Pomodoro a while back but assumed it was something you just either 'got' or didn't - it didn't seem like something anyone without ADD would have to work for. So when it didn't quickly work for me, i just threw in the towel. Maybe I'll give it another shot.

If only it was something you either "got" or "didn't". I think it really depends on your personality and what you're working on. I find that it works best for long, drawn-out projects where each single task can take hours (so I used it a lot during school). Now, sometimes a task will take 10 minutes, others 45 minutes, others 3 hours, and so I find that it's much more difficult to break down work into Pomodoros.

One of the valuable things about Pomodoro is just the forcing factor. You might have a bunch of random tasks with varying lengths, but getting into the habit of "I will work on X until this signal" forces you to actually start and get into the swing of work, rather than procrastinate.

Pomodoro happened to work for me, but other tools may have been as effective. I've tried a few and, at the worst point, I couldn't focus for more than 15 minutes before becoming distracted. It may also have been due to my massive fear of starting this huge project and, finally, having a chance to prove myself... or not, as my fear said. Pomodoro may just have been the tool I was using at the point the fear finally began to lift, and my productivity took over.

Great post Ian. I can totally relate to it and there are some fantastic tips that I need to apply to my work. I hope I can fix my procrastination and focus on one thing at a time.

Great stuff, Ian. Im going it alone too, and you actually reminded me that I have to go update blossom and try to use it before writing any line of code.

Are any of ya'll enjoying this more now than when you worked as a team? I've found the whole process of programming far more fun now.

OP didn't do it alone. He did it by himself.

A person can do almost everything by himself, but almost nothing alone.

I've read your comment a few times, but I'm still failing to extract anything semantically meaningful from it. Could you clarify?

"By himself" = physical isolation

"alone" = societal, emotional, or other abstract isolation

You could interchange these definitions, and they would be correct.

English has a lot of word pairs where you can say "This is not X, it is Y", where the statement would work in reverse.

Both alone and 'by himself' have both physical and moral meanings.

Possibly. I'm just inferring the GP's distinction of the terms from context.

@iancackett Awesome first post!

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