I really need to finish some projects.
I find myself frequently hamstrung by tooling and process hang-ups which are due to old incomplete projects blocking completion of new projects.
Do you see what’s going on here? It is a feedback loop which causes exponential delays into infinity.
Take Forevernote as an example. Evernote accelerated my work immensely because I could get ideas down with almost no friction via almost any means and easily retrieve it later for reference, iteration, etc. But Evernote became untrustworthy and after an exhaustive failed search for a replacement, I decided I had to build my own: Forevernote .
Like most projects I started with enthusiasm and made some initial progress, but unlike other projects, this one was of interest only to me, and as such there was no external motivation to complete it. As it only benefited me, and there were work-arounds, Forevernote yielded to projects which had a wider audience.
Now years later, my notes are scattered across several systems and retrieval is more time-consuming than ever. In some cases I’ve lost project information completely (ironically Forevernote is one of these projects...). These losses impact other projects exponentially because notes and documentation are at the root of everything I work on.
This is just one example of a class of “tooling” problems that I can never seem to solve.
- Jason