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Ask HN: Big ambitions, poor execution. What do I do about this?

12 points by dwaters ↗ HN
I have very big ambitions, but poor execution. I am focussed in one sense - I am able to keep coming back to wanting to execute on the same ambitions and the things I want to execute on have obessed me over the last few years. But, this obessession to execute on the fixed set of ambitions have not translated into the intenisity of effort and the requisite amount of effort needed to accomplish something meaningul.

The pomodoro technique has been very helpful to reach an improved level of execition. Are there other techniques out there?

Have other HNers faced this themselves and overcome it?

I have the feeling that I have great potential and yet I am throwing my life away due to a lack of focus.

Your help and advice is much appreciated.

9 comments

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vldx
If you didn't already - I highly encourage you to check [1] The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. It will shift your perspective by showing you how and why most of the people self sabotage themselves and what it takes to do the work.

[1] - http://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/19...

marooned
This was a transformational book for me. Although there are parts to it that are somewhat metaphysical/spiritual. If you are willing to look past those and read the rest for what it's worth it has the potential to impact you very positively.
rgbrenner
When an idea is just a project that you're working on by yourself, it's easy to get distracted, let timelines slip, etc.. since no one cares, no one will hold you accountable, and you'll never need to tell someone why X wasn't finished on time.

Get as quickly to an MVP as you can and get a few customers. Or find a partner who believes in this idea as much as you do.

dwaters
On the same note, I have heard of declaring publicly that I plan on achieving a certain goal/end result with the idea that not achieving it will make me look bad. I have not tried this though. Thanks for your suggestion.
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yosheeck
Hah, found it myself - pomodoro was working for me years ago (That's why I implemented http://pomodorro.net). However, pomodoro was somehow not fully natural for me, probably because of being not really task oriented, but somehow artificially time oriented...

At some point I realised, the great idea is what I call "do-dids". It's nothing really new, it's just all focus-management ideas in one bucket.

So, Do-Did is something simple. Just plan a task, and do it, and then be happy you did it:

1/ Plan a TODO task(s) during some less-focused time: during a shower, a drive, while making a coffee, during boring meeting, your office-kitchen time. Just plan a task in all the possible ways: what to do in optimistic path (when stuff goes as expected), but also in pessimistic way (when you get stuck in a task).

1.2/ A task should be something achievable, actually a micro-task. Don't plan "building a website". Plan "a hello-world server started", then "added .css/.js file handling", then "first content server to browser"...

2/ Prepare environment: that's tricky... Read all the e-mails (and respond), read the news, prepare the hot coffee, go to toilet. Nothing like that is allowed after you start the do-did (of course in common-sense...). Now, important for me was to have a "focus maintainer" and "world-insulator". Before I used pomodoro, but now I went back to old-school: I play one CD of well-known music. Not really a CD of course (I actually use mp3+winamp == really old-school).

3/ Do: put on your headphones, play the CD and don't stop until the task or CD is finished. It's up to you what to do if you finish the task (you can start next one or take a break) or the CD before the task (you may need a break, but maybe you can just start next CD). What matters here for me, is that CD time - 60-80 minutes works really good for me.

3.1/ No distractions. No news, no email, no co-workers... Definitely no facebook !

4/ Did: you did it ! Now do something nice for you (coffee, browse the net, take a walk around, ...) Tell yourself you did it, think about it for a while (something like scrum's retrospective or sprint's review). The task is done, you can now plan the next stuff - phase #1 again.

Do-Dids work great for me. There is plenty of time for everything. I realised that "planning phase" is very good thing, as then the "Do" phase usually goes quite good.

Do-dids are actually compact/personal version of scrum sprints for me, just happening in parts-of-day basis, instead of weeks.

dwaters
Very interesting. In step 4, after you have accomplished your goal what can I do that completely resets/reboots my brain? If I have been coding for 60 minutes, and I choose to spend the next 20 minutes as my break is there a recommended activity that completely rejuvenates? I am open to listening to music, exercise, watching videos, a snack etc. However, I rarely feel refreshed at the end of this break and dread going back to work again. Appreciate your thoughts on this.
yosheeck
Actually, it doesn't really matter that much for me. I mean each time I do something else. Maybe something around the house or the office, talk to someone, do some physical job (like scan/print documents) or pay the bills, do your ebay/amazon shopping... It doesn't even have to be a typical "rest" each time. Anything that is just not The Big Thing - not writing code in my case.