When it comes to personal projects, I keep being attracted to the next shiny thing. As soon as I get my hands on it, though, it becomes dull, outshone by the next one.
Because of this, I keep moving on to new things, exploring new ideas, starting new projects, but I never take any of them past some kind of “finish line”, a satisfying conclusion.
I’ve even reached a point where I’m stuck, unable to start anything new because I tell myself, “I won’t have time to finish it anyway.”
To break this pattern, I’ve decided to try a new experiment.
In this experiment, I’ll pick a new “idea” from my ideas stash, and explore that idea for a week.
Every other idea, whether already in my stash or new, I’ll consider a distraction from bringing my current focus to a satisfying stopping point.
My hunch is that counterintuitively, reducing the possibilities will allow me to achieve more. By knowing what I’ll be working on for a week, I’m reducing time used hesitating between ideas, and building excitement and momentum.
Not every project will fit neatly into a week. Some will be tiny and may only require a day or two of my attention, while others might require several weeks before being even close to completion. So I’ll have to adapt.
I’ve come up with a set of rules that I can get back to whenever analysis paralysis hits:
- Each idea starts with a budget of a week.
- A focus week can be extended by one additional week, at most once. For this to happen, I need to be able to justify that extra time with a clear definition of done and enough motivation. This limit allows me to preserve novelty and helps me avoid boredom or burnout.
- To avoid Parkinson’s Law (“work expands to fill the time available for its completion”), I’ll allow myself to pick a second project in the middle of the week if the first one reached its goals early.
- If an idea requires more time, I’ll still define a satisfying stopping point within the allocated time. Any remaining work goes back into my ideas stash and must compete with other ideas for a future week.
- To be eligible, an idea/project should have at least one of these traits:
- It solves an actual problem for me or someone I know.
- It is an opportunity to learn.
- It is fun to work on.
- It is an opportunity to practice and improve my use of AI tools.
- Every focused week will start with:
- a minimal pitch justifying the time I’ll spend on it
- a reasonable (but challenging) definition of done that I estimate can be reached in a week.
- Every focused week will wrap up with a minimal retrospective, including
details such as:
- progress
- successes/failures
- learnings.
- Some ideas will need preliminary work (research what I need to get started, gather hardware when necessary), which can be done in advance but should be strictly timebound. No more than 3 hours in a whole week should be spent grooming future ideas.
I will run this experiment for a while, at least until the end of 2026, likely a few months into 2027. My hope is that I can learn what keeps me interested long enough to reach a satisfying stopping point. I’ll try to report every few weeks on how it feels.
There are only 11 weeks left in the year. That’s potentially 11 ideas I could dedicate time to before 2027! It does not sound like a lot, but is also way more than I’ve seriously worked on so far in 2026!