Letting go of goals

Do you know the feeling when you have a new idea and want to pursue it immediately? When you can't stop thinking about it? So you start working on it, and it's the most fun you have ever had on a project. But soon you realize that it takes longer to finish than originally anticipated (which I believe is true for every project you'll ever do). And when the next shiny idea comes along, you start working on it instead.

I have had this happen to me over and over again. Since April this year alone, I started working on four different software projects and abandoned them all after less than three weeks. I thought that committing to an idea publically helps me in holding myself accountable. So in a previous post, I wrote that I want to explore how I can use software development to become a better writer. And it turns out it doesn't. The question is now, how to break the cycle and actually finish a project.

For me, software projects have a specific challenge. I simply love starting them so much that whenever I have a problem that can be solved by using software, my immediate reaction is not to research different solutions, but to start working on my own. But I have another problem with them. As I wrote in the already mentioned post, I spend the last five years learning about Computer Science. With that comes the desire to use the there acquired knowledge in my side projects to not make the last five years seem wasted. But let's assume that studying Computer Science was the wrong decision for me and the last five years have been a total waste of time. The only way to stop wasting time then is to acknowledge this and focus on doing something different.

To be clear, I don't think studying Computer Science was a waste of time. I still love the ideas I engaged with and last month, I started to work full time as a software engineer. Through this came the realization that I don't have as much time for my side projects as I may like. Somewhat counterintuitively, this is great because it forces me to focus and to really think about how I want to spend my time. While thinking about this, I asked myself whether I would write or develop software if I could only do one. I struggled a lot with this question. Not because the answer isn't clear. It was immediately obvious to me that I would choose writing. I struggled with it because I didn't want the reality behind it to be true. I wanted to do both. And the hard thing was to accept that I can't.

Where do I go from here? I don't yet know. Right now, I'm exploring ideas for a side project for the next five years. Considering only such a big commitment actually helps, because it removes all these small project ideas that I think would be fun to do, but don't have the intention of finishing once working on them gets hard. It forces me to think longterm. Paradoxically, I'm exploring more ideas now than before, because I'm not just committing to the first that comes along. And once I know what I will do, you'll first learn about it here.