The ADHD Programmer in Middle Age...

[elfs]

Sigh. This is gonna be whiny.

What the Hell is wrong with me? I seem to be completely unable to concentrate on anything for very long. This really came to a head recently when I read Warren Ellis' article on where ideas came from. After talking about doing the real world thing, about reading and living and that One Moment when the story comes to you, he wrote:

For that brief moment where it's all flaring and welding together, you are Holy. You can't be touched. Something impossible and brilliant has happened and suddenly you understand what it would be like if Einstein's brain was placed into the body of a young tyrannosaur, stuffed full of amphetamines and suffused with Sex Radiation.

That is what has happened to me tonight. I am beaming Sex Rays across the world and my brain is all lit up with Holy Fire. If I felt like it, I could shag a million nuns and destroy their faith in Christ.

No shit, Warren.

I was playing the other day with a to-do manager. I know I shouldn't do that; I have a perfectly good system on paper that works just fine. But I can't help the temptations of the electronica and its shininess, so I was playing with it. Wrestling is more like it, though, because the thing sucked: it didn't have contextualizations, and it was really hard to isolate down what to do "at home" or "at the office" or "at the computer", like David says you should.

I had thoughts like "It would be nice if this thing had a search function!" and "In the real world we don't categorize things at a certain scale; we tag them!" And then, in that brilliant bolt of heat and light that Ellis describes, the entire thing fell out of my head. I grabbed the nearest notebook and began scribbling. I threw out one sheet, then another, then another. By the fifth sheet I had a working UML Client-Server Logical View and a pretty good idea of the UML Class Diagram for the first-pass SQL database on the sixth. I realized I was actually designing a generic system, and branched it out into three different ideas: a single-user to-do system with a variable dating structure for pending and immanent tasks; a multi-user to-do system with a variable dating structure and a rich interface; a multi-user to-do system with a tagging and search system. I realized what I'd been doing wrong with my design of Consilience and fixed it.

As I was suffused with this holy fire, a first-pass implementation rumbled through my head. I had been reading up on Django and Dojo recently, and finally had found the perfect excuse.

And then I realized I would actually have to write the damn things. I'd have to find a graphic art theme for them. (My brain says "Ben Franklin! Zombies! iUI!") I'd have to put them up somewhere, let other people bash on them, and maybe someday I'd even market them.

And that just seemed like work.

See, and I do this shit with writing, too. I get a great idea and I write it down, and then I realize I have to write a whole freakin' story around the idea to make it work, to bring it to life. I have to write out the the characters getting to the story so I can learn to live with them as more than mere stereotypes (and believe me, Linia & Misuko have been on my ass all month to get to their next novel) boinking away on page after page.

Maybe it's just age. I don't see the reward anymore, especially not of converting my efforts into commercial ventures. The writing isn't going to bring in income, and it's not getting me laid nearly as often as it did a decade ago-- and I wouldn't have the personal time to enjoy it even if offers were flowing in. And the programming, while fun, is also work: it's what I do at the office.

And the GTD people always tell you that the real secret is to "just start." Yeah, I try that. My hard-drive is littered with projects I "just started," but never got around to finishing.

How do you do it?

Comments

[lisakit.livejournal.com]

Pick one and stick with it?

Send wife and kids to a friend's house for an afternoon (Ya know y'all are always welcome)?

Offer out the 1st or 2nd draft stuff for help with basic editing?

Compile your next book? Market your first one more aggressively? Do both?

Stop worrying about it when you're sick and get better first?

[dossy.livejournal.com]

What I've realized is that I need a "coding buddy" - someone to pair with who is interested in the project when I'm not and keeps it moving forward and vice-versa. Someone who can egg me on when I just want to throw in the towel and vice-versa.

Of course, being in Northern New Jersey, it's ridiculously tough to find a coding buddy - it's like New Jersey is a black hole when it comes to modern technology. But, I haven't given up, yet.

[ysabel.livejournal.com]

I have this exact same problem.

[ysabel.livejournal.com]

Only my day job involves a lot of stupid political shit, I don't get to use fun tools, and there's not even any opportunity for the Sex Rays. Which is sucking my soul out.

My perspective on it

[fenton.livejournal.com]

The entry got too long for here, so I posted it to my own journal (http://fenton.livejournal.com/25230.html).

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

mmm, that's exactly why we paired-off with another writer. one or the other of us actually has the oomph at any given time. ^_^

[jenk]

My hard-drive is littered with projects I "just started," but never got around to finishing.

Has it occurred to you that maybe your hard drive is littered with projects you scoped out and considered, but decided weren't right for you at this moment? ;)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

All of them?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Well, okay, let me rephrase that. I obviously did not drop all of them; I completely redesigned the Pendorwright ego-site with some nifty hand-made graphics and two backends-- the blog in Wordpress, and the story engines in eRuby, with an interface between the two to support the "new stories" widget and RSS feed. So I did everything there-- I just can't seem to get that gumption often enough for my satisfaction.

[lisakit.livejournal.com]

She has a point though, maybe you should go through and drop projects? Be ruthless, keep only 20% (and if that's too scary, just put the other 80% in a different file). Or devote and afternoon or two to just going through and see which ones still inspire you. Then apply yourself.

[sandhawke.livejournal.com]

But that misses the point. He already has dropped them. Not deleted them, just put them down, out of the way, where they will be if for some reason circumstances change and it makes sense to pick them up again.

I'm firmly with jenk about this. Trust yourself more. It was fun and worthwhile to scope out the project, and it was probably fun and worthwhile to get started. When you stopped, it was probably because you had a good reason to stop, even if it didn't really feel like it at the time, and even if you beat yourself up about it when you think about it now. If you had kept working on it, some cool things would perhaps have resulted, but other cool things would probably not have happened.

(at least, that's how I live with this same problem.)

Seconded

[fenton.livejournal.com]

Don't consider "a project I've never worked on further" to be an innate failure. It is only a problem if you *want* to work on that project, and haven't. And I don't mean "want" in the generalized sense of wanting to finish everything you start -- the crux of the issue is telling that apart from the "No, I really *want* to work on that" state. Because the later indicates that you've hit a significant roadblock and need to step back and evaluate it using whatever other tools you have for that task, but the former just means you're stuck in this stupid reality where things don't get done at the speed of thought and the universe doesn't read your mind (or at least, when it does, it generally does so only to prove that it has a twisted sense of humor).

[codeamazon.livejournal.com]

Limit my starts. If I get too much backlog, I have to weed out the overage before I let myself start a new one.

For example, I've wanted to start a new papercutting for a while, but keep reminding myself that physical creative projects need to wait until the house is more organized, or they will get ruined and I'll be frustrated.

I also try to group them. Time to re-design the company web site? Ok...I'll do LSB's at the same time, and also investigate Google services for a web site for a committee I'm volunteering with. When those are done, I can move on to the next thing.

I do MUCH better if I group things logically like that. Three sewing projects at once will get done. One sewing project, one design project, and one gardening project will languish. It's how my (ADHD) brain works. I can "focus" on a related group of data, basically.

[ibsulon.livejournal.com]

It seems to be a common problem with Americans, myself included. Finishing means that you have to accept something that is less than your perfectionist intention. That's why most of these projects really need a second eye to keep us on track.

[neoteny.livejournal.com]

I also have a hard drive littered with projects I will never start, much less complete. Outsourcing could work, but takes its own time and money. Ideally I'd like an entire company based around turning my good ideas into products. And a pony.

The most prolific people I know have less time to enjoy their success, but more resources with which to enjoy it.

Now you are ready to be a CTO

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

The ultimate individual-contributor position-- you have the ideas, and other people do the implementation.

I suggest you title your plan "A Web 2.0 Cloudware Task Manager", take it to your own CTO, and ask him to put you in touch with the local VC community.

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[shunra.livejournal.com]

Hmmm.

Me too, except in a slightly different field of venture.

I find that the only way to get things done is bird by bird, to quote a particularly irritating (if only for its hard-core truth) creativity manual. Bird by goddamn bird.

That and... Tim Ferris (who wrote the INCREDIBLY IRRITATING Four Hour Work Week book) had a guest blogger a couple of weeks ago who talked about the manic depressive cycle of entrepreneurship. here. Go. Read. It describes the cycle, and what to to about it, and I think it sides with Jenk, Lisakit, and Sandhawke: if it's not done, maybe it's done.

One last strategy: when I get frustrated with inability to go forward, I count stuff. In particular, when I used to get frustrated with translating books (loooooooooong. Booooooooooring.) I would count the books I had already translated. For a while, I counted to one. I stopped (almost stopped, it's a hard habit to break) translating books around the time that I had to/got to count to thirty. Even counting to one helped, but from about three, it helped a lot. YMMV.

[cadetstar.livejournal.com]

Similar issue, but I get bogged down in a different area of the development process. I love the coding part, and hacking away when obvious bugs appear. It's the QCing and testing phase that I get stuck in.

-Michael

[flwyd.livejournal.com]

I realize I have to write a whole freakin' story around the idea to make it work, to bring it to life.

Jorge Luis Borges, in the introduction to one of his collections, said something to the effect of "Some people write an entire book about a concept which can be expressed in a few paragraphs. I invent books and write about them so that I can get to the core of the matter without all that work."

As a side advantage, he can introduce heretical ideas without claiming to believe them (http://www.southerncrossreview.org/49/borges-judas-eng.htm).

[aelfie.livejournal.com]

and it's not getting me laid nearly as often as it did a decade ago

Maybe you've just worn out the "getting laid" vibes in Seattle. I'm sure if you went somewhere else, say, Silicon Valley, I'm positive there would be plenty of people willing to say "Thank you" in the best possible way.

...

Okay, maybe I'm only speaking for myself.

...

Alright, my husband too.