Looking at my calendar over the last 8 months, it looks like my attention span for a project is about 1-1.5 weeks. I’m musing on what it would like to lean into that. Have multiple projects at once? Work extra hard to ensure I hit save points before the weekends? Only work on things in week long bursts?
I’m noticing an even more granular version of this. Things that I might do casually (reading some blog posts) have a significant effect on what’s loaded into my mind the next day. Smaller than the week level, I’m noticing a 2-3 day cycle of “the thing that was most recently in my head” and how it effects the question of “If I could work on anything rn what would it be?”
This week on Tuesday I picked Wednesday as the day I was going to write a sketch. But because of something I was thinking before going to bed, on Wednesday my head was filled with thoughts on urbex. So I switched gears, and urbex thoughts ran their course through Wednesday, and on Thursday I was ready to actually write a sketch (comedy thoughts need to be loaded for that)
Possible hack related to small wins. Many of the projects that I stopped got stopped part way through “continuing more of the same”. One was writing my Hazardous Guide to Words, and the other was researching how the internet works. Maybe I could work on one cohesive thing for longer if there was a significant victory and gear shift after a work. Like, if I was making a video game, “Yay, I finished making all the art assets, onto actual code” or something.
The target audience for Hazardous Guide is friends of yours, correct? (vaguely recall that)
A thing that normally works for writing is that after each chunk, I get to publish a thing and get comments. One thing about Hazardous Guide is that it mostly isn’t new material for LW veterans, so I could see it getting less feedback than average. Might be able to address by actually showing parts to friends if you haven’t
Ooo, good point. I was getting a lot less feedback form than then from other things. There’s one piece of feedback which is “am I on the right track?” and another that’s just “yay, people are engaging!” both of which seem relevant to motivation.
If you can be deliberate about learning from projects, this could actually be a good setup – doing one project a week, learning what you can from it, and moving on actually seems pretty good if you’re optimizing for skill growth.
Yeah, being explicit about 1 week would likely help. The projects that made me make this observation were all ones where I was trying to do more than a weeks worth of stuff, and a week is were I decided to move to something else.
I expect “I have a week to learn about X” would both take into account waning/waxing interest, and add a bit of rush-motivation.
Looking at my calendar over the last 8 months, it looks like my attention span for a project is about 1-1.5 weeks. I’m musing on what it would like to lean into that. Have multiple projects at once? Work extra hard to ensure I hit save points before the weekends? Only work on things in week long bursts?
I’m noticing an even more granular version of this. Things that I might do casually (reading some blog posts) have a significant effect on what’s loaded into my mind the next day. Smaller than the week level, I’m noticing a 2-3 day cycle of “the thing that was most recently in my head” and how it effects the question of “If I could work on anything rn what would it be?”
This week on Tuesday I picked Wednesday as the day I was going to write a sketch. But because of something I was thinking before going to bed, on Wednesday my head was filled with thoughts on urbex. So I switched gears, and urbex thoughts ran their course through Wednesday, and on Thursday I was ready to actually write a sketch (comedy thoughts need to be loaded for that)
Possible hack related to small wins. Many of the projects that I stopped got stopped part way through “continuing more of the same”. One was writing my Hazardous Guide to Words, and the other was researching how the internet works. Maybe I could work on one cohesive thing for longer if there was a significant victory and gear shift after a work. Like, if I was making a video game, “Yay, I finished making all the art assets, onto actual code” or something.
The target audience for Hazardous Guide is friends of yours, correct? (vaguely recall that)
A thing that normally works for writing is that after each chunk, I get to publish a thing and get comments. One thing about Hazardous Guide is that it mostly isn’t new material for LW veterans, so I could see it getting less feedback than average. Might be able to address by actually showing parts to friends if you haven’t
Ooo, good point. I was getting a lot less feedback form than then from other things. There’s one piece of feedback which is “am I on the right track?” and another that’s just “yay, people are engaging!” both of which seem relevant to motivation.
If you can be deliberate about learning from projects, this could actually be a good setup – doing one project a week, learning what you can from it, and moving on actually seems pretty good if you’re optimizing for skill growth.
Yeah, being explicit about 1 week would likely help. The projects that made me make this observation were all ones where I was trying to do more than a weeks worth of stuff, and a week is were I decided to move to something else.
I expect “I have a week to learn about X” would both take into account waning/waxing interest, and add a bit of rush-motivation.