Ask HN: What's stopping you from starting your side project?
I used to hear that question, from friends or my own inner voice, and it stung. Why hadn’t I built that app, finished that novel, or launched that YouTube idea?
Recently I tried something simple, I think I might have read this in a book somewhere: I dumped every “someday” idea onto paper.
Then I split them:
Still excited about it = keep
Not anymore = trash
From the keep pile, I broke each dream into the tiniest first step, then scheduled it into my actual week.
The result? I’ve made some progress, but more importantly, I feel lighter. No more carrying the guilt of dozens of unfinished projects in my head.
So I’m curious:
What's the primary thing that stops you from starting? And what’s been the most effective way you’ve found to actually start?
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Lately I have been so busy taking photographs [1] and developing photographs and posting them to socials that I haven’t had time to code anything in my own account. Arknights eats up the rest of time.
I have an RSS reader and an “image sorter” that I wrote that I use everyday, there are a lot of things I could do to improve them but they work great so I don’t need to.
Winter is coming and since I took so many photographs I expect to run them out of my file and stay indoor more. If I can’t be a baller [2] I wish could get paid to shoot basketball this winter though and maybe I will get brave enough to bundle up and shoot landscapes outdoors.
The basic project management practice is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban ↗
Which for creative projects is what you are doing: “finish what you start”. Normally I have three projects at any given time that I’ll say I am committed to, two I make real progress on, one is aspirational. That system works for me.
In the case of my photography the start-finish gap is in the developing. Particularly in sports it is easy to shoot 3000 pictures of the game and not develop any. I get paid to do running events where I’m expected to turn around the results quickly and my goal is to get a good shot of everyone who ran so I have to be fast and that’s changed the way I think about other sports —- now I can get 100 shots out of one game that are good enough to put in my file (on one level one game is as good as the next) but I’m learning how to get just a few great shots very quickly the way a pro photog would. For the two games I went to yesterday I saw just half so I’d have fewer to develop.
[1] yesterday that meant going to an American football game, then hiking up a creek in water shoes, then going to an association football game. Today I want to get good pictures of Goldenrods for the file and find at least one first-class sports pic from yesterday to post to the LinkedIn alumni group for my Uni.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmXZOI7cM0M ↗
Because I have a million other things I want to do after I get off work than spend more time at my computer…
Spend time with my wife (kids are grown), travel, hang out with friends, exercise, learn Spanish since we will be a spending a couple of months every year in a Spanish speaking country for the next few years (staying in US time zones).
Even when I was younger from the time I was 22-36, I had a working hobby (the money was only $25 per class 8-10 hours a week) teaching fitness classes as a forced commitment device and it was part of my social life.
Nothing about spending extra time at my computer where I’m not exchanging labor for money improves my quality of life.
Nothing is stopping me from starting my side project because I genuinely enjoy working on it. But the side project has nothing to do with software or financial incentives.
If you're having trouble starting a side project it may be because you don't actually want to work on it.
I can never keep my focus and excitement for long term, so I always dreamed about getting a job that is the same as one of my hobbies.
I might end up hating it, but I can use the skills built for similar hobbies and speed up all of them.
Because I'm excited about all my side projects and I'm old and don't have the same energy I did in my 20s. And I have many more obligations :)