Inspiration vs Distraction
TweetWhen the bug of inspiration bites, what do you do? Do you drop the old project and go for the new shiny one? Or do you ignore the urge?
I am one those of people who is constantly switching between my personal projects. I will work tirelessly on project A, and then on a certain Tuesday when the wind is blowing just right, I’ll suddenly lose all desire for project A and find a sudden and insatiable urge to work on project B. When inspiration strikes, it tends to be very difficult for me to ignore. My hard drive is consequently littered with half-starts, rough outlines, notes, and various ideas, bad and good, in various stages of completion.
This brings up the interesting question as to what the preferred state of affairs is. Should I be more disciplined and learned to ignore the grass-is-always-greener syndromes, or should I go with my own fickle whims? Am I perpetually distracted by these flirtations of inspiration, or is this, in some way, healthy? Given that I almost always chose to drop the old clunker and work on the new thing, you could certainly read into my character quite a bit, if you wanted. Maybe I am too fickle. Maybe I am easily distracted. Maybe I’ll never actually accomplish any of these things. Maybe. I see it another way.
Most projects get exactly one burst of effort before permanent abandonment. Some problems though, I find myself coming back to time and again. I view this particular mechanism as healthy. It’s a natural selection of my ideas. May the fittest survive. This is why I don’t really feel guilty for dropping yet-another half-started project and starting something new. If the idea survives a few months off, it’s probably worth keeping. If it doesn’t, so be it.
Embrace the distraction
So in that vein, I’ve put on hold several slightly boring personal projects for a shiny new one. I’m writing a game. Oh this will end well. I’ve spent the last three weekends tearing apart the UDK to learn how it works and over that time I’ve put together this spectacularly early prototype:
So here’s to another distraction.
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December 14th, 2009 at 11:21 am
Oh, amen. My problem, though, is that those half-finished projects continue to nag at me. Just in the past couple of weeks I’ve started an effort to, in effect, declare bankruptcy. Anything that’s ‘finished’ (using the word very loosely), I’m releasing into the wild. Anything that isn’t, I’m writing off as a lost cause. Either way, I don’t plan to revisit any of them again. I have too many ideas for projects-to-be to be spending my energy on old ones that have obviously run their course.
December 14th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
brandy,
thanks for the post, i really appreciated it, and this area is something that i have thought a lot about as well. i too have dozens of projects, many barely started, and a small handful of recurrent (reentrant?) ones that i’ve been working on for years. i used to feel bad about bouncing around between them or abandoning them, in the sense of “finish what you start”. but after awhile i realized that for me, following inspiration or curiosity is a better path than sticking to an adage. and what’s wrong with pushing ten projects forward one unit instead of one project forward ten units? and i noticed the “time filter” effect as well — that some ideas have legs and that that quality may only be revealed after some time has elapsed. the latest project i’ve begun incubating is a continuation of something i started on the c64 in high school in ’88! the weirdness of doing that and the nostalgia appeal to me, and the original kernel of inspiration still speaks to me, and i never got it as far along as i had hoped so…we’ll see if it has legs.
i have observed two pitfalls with this approach however. one is that i can easily spend A LOT of time daydreaming/designing/planning/scenario-building and not really producing anything, which is okay, because i don’t want to be attached to the idea that i have to produce something, but i actually do want to produce something sometimes, and so there is a balance to strike. second, when other people are involved, i have to be really wary about committing my time, since there is never enough of it to do all of the things that it would be cool to do. i’ve learned the latter the hard way, by failing to deliver on commitments. it doesn’t feel good, and i hope not to do it again!
anyway, thanks for starting the conversation and keep up the good work.
adam
December 23rd, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Really nice post, kind of reminds me of myself coming up with projects to teach myself a new language or whatnot, only to figure out I can’t pay attention to them all as much as I’d like.
Can you ellaborate further on your game? It bears some resemblance to HyperBlade (back in the last century), but with much less blood