If this is your first time reading, I recommend you start with my 6-month challenge and table of contents of weekly posts for the past 21 weeks.
tl;dr I tried an experiment two weeks ago of being transparent with my roadmap and ran into some problems, such as menu accuracy. This hindered me from my goals. I also personally felt it was a mistake to be transparent with my roadmap; there are arguments for and counterarguments against sharing your goals. I also encountered unexpected costs of context switching and did some personal reflection.
It’s been a little tough too, and slow (given the holidays), to make progress on both my projects equally.
Rather than make my roadmap transparent (which I’ll go into why this failed), I will instead post my weekly goals vs. what I accomplished both at the end of the week, rather than at the beginning.
I. Roadmap expectations vs. reality
II. Unexpected costs of context switching
III. Sharing goals or don’t share goals?
IV. Slow weeks, taking some time to reflect
Another reason people don’t work on big projects is, ironically, fear of wasting time. What if they fail? Then all the time they spent on it will be wasted. (In fact it probably won’t be, because work on hard projects almost always leads somewhere.)
But the trouble with big problems can’t be just that they promise no immediate reward and might cause you to waste a lot of time. If that were all, they’d be no worse than going to visit your in-laws. There’s more to it than that. Big problems are terrifying. There’s an almost physical pain in facing them. It’s like having a vacuum cleaner hooked up to your imagination. All your initial ideas get sucked out immediately, and you don’t have any more, and yet the vacuum cleaner is still sucking.
You can’t look a big problem too directly in the eye. You have to approach it somewhat obliquely. But you have to adjust the angle just right: you have to be facing the big problem directly enough that you catch some of the excitement radiating from it, but not so much that it paralyzes you. You can tighten the angle once you get going, just as a sailboat can sail closer to the wind once it gets underway.
If you want to work on big things, you seem to have to trick yourself into doing it. You have to work on small things that could grow into big things, or work on successively larger things, or split the moral load with collaborators. It’s not a sign of weakness to depend on such tricks. The very best work has been done this way.
– Paul Graham, Good and Bad Procrastination