Today, looking at one my personal resolutions, I suddenly came up with a new software idea. It is so funny in some ways ... and sad in others.
The funny part is that it might be a professional defect, in other words, because I'm a software engineer. You know what they say ... when all you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails. Or something like that, I forgot the original saying. This case is no different.
It's no surprise that looking at my personal New Year resolutions, the first idea that pops into my mind is "Wouldn't it be nice if I had a software to help me solve this problem and achieve my personal resolution?"
Software engineers are so predictable. While that might be funny, let me tell you why I'm not laughing...
One of the sad parts is that in fact I'm diverting from my real target here, the personal resolution, to something else. A software idea. It is quite sad as it's a convenient way of sweeping resolutions under the carpet. I have to forget about that. Unless I come with an idea of a tool to automatically generate the software that will solve my personal problems. Or automate that automatic tool too. Well, you get the picture and it's not nice. It's recursion without escape.
The other part why this is sad is because it diverts attention from my main software idea. This is a serious topic and many people fall into that trap. It happens with software ideas. While you are working on your next software product, suddenly you think about another product. You think it's much better than the previous. Or much easier to do. In any case, you get excited and instead of focusing on continuing your work, you spend a lot of time focused on this new exciting idea.
If you're not careful, you end up starting working on the new idea thinking this one is for you, only to realize somewhere down the line that you have yet another cool idea that's even more brilliant. In the end nothing gets completed.
It's not something that happens only with ideas. It happens with tasks and things to do. If you don't clear your To Do list by actually Doing them, you end up with an ever increasing pile of tasks. The more tasks you have, the more tired you will be, as you will psychologically perceive yourself as being swamped with a lot of work which you can never finish.
At some point you feel you need help, you go buy a book that basically tells you how to get things done and ultimately feel good about yourself. It's amazing the relief when you clear your TO DO list. You really feel good about yourself.
There are many techniques to teach you how to do things. You can buy tons of books and/or software to help you with the problem. But ultimately it's all about focus. You get things done by focusing on them and Doing them. There's no magic potion that will do the work for you.
The key however is in the focus.
There's only so many things people can do concurrently. They actually need to focus on something in order to DO it. Many techniques suggest that you should prioritize things in your TO DO list, in order to reduce the number of tasks that fight for your attention. One technique reduces everything to one. Focus on the most important thing on your list, do it, move on to the next. It's all about focus.
Same goes for implementing a software idea. You need focus and perseverance. That's why I'm going to lock my new idea in the back of the mind (it's still a good idea) and revisit it a bit later, once I get my product out.
Monday, January 08, 2007 9:47:42 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
