Ask HN: How do you decide on what to build/avoid decision paralysis?

24 points by nonasktell 3 years ago | 11 comments

I have a hundred ideas and a dozen half finished projects, I haven't shipped anything in so long.

Whenever I start working on something I get new ideas that seems better, and I get distracted.

Sometimes I'm also spending so much time trying to decide between multiple things to build that I end up doing nothing

How do you manage? Do you have any advice?

Over the past 3 years I launched maybe 2/3 very basic sites, I rarely complete anything actually complex and always jump to something new before I'm done

cwdegidio 3 years ago |

I've actually suffered form something similar for many years. I was recently talking to a mentor of mine complaining about this and he asked me "What is it that gives you paralysis and causes you to abandon projects?"

It really made me think about it. For me it was spending hours thinking "what if someone looks at my code and I'm not using the absolute best-fit design pattern because I didn't know about it. What if I used the wrong package or project structure..."

After I told him this, he said to me "You build things for people to use... only other developers are going to sweat the details. At the end of the day, let's say you do come up with a project that gets wings... who is going to be cutting the check? People who use the product and only care if it fits THEIR needs or a room full of developers who have nothing to show for anything other than a lot of flame posts?"

At the same time as this conversation was occurring, I was reading Seneca's "On the Shortness of Life." Pretty much a whole dialogue about getting off your a@# and just doing something.

Finally, take what you learned doing partial project A and see if you can apply those lessons to partial project B... it just may be that a few projects can be refactored from lessons and insights gained from other projects.

marginalia_nu 3 years ago |

At least with me, externalizing the ideas, having literally any process helps focus so much.

Whenever I get a cool idea, big or small, I write it on a post-it and put it on a wall, then I can have faith that it is still there after I've finished what I'm doing. This is on a feature level, but some of them are ambitious multi-week things.

I think at least for me, the more I work the more ideas I have, and the more difficult it becomes to focus on finishing something that isn't very fun. If I can trust they still exist later, that isn't so much of an obstacle, but an asset, and I can finish drawing the owl in peace.

Having a battery of ideas ready to go also means sometimes I can often be extremely productive, and finish like 5-6 features in a few hours. Usually when I get stuck and end up procrastinating, it's because I don't know what to do next. The wall-of-ideas solves that.

It's like zero planning scrum. YMMV, but I've found it incredibly effective.

posix86 3 years ago |

> How do you manage?

You're asking bcs you think the way it is is bad, no?

You've spent 3 years trying to find out what the best thing to do could be. If you had found it & done it, that would've been the best outcome. But you didn't, and did almost nothing. Even doing anything would've been better than that! So, do that: do anything.

In my view, finishing something is almost always better than finding the best project to finish. So pick something, anything, and do it. If you can't decide which, then which you choose doesn't matter. And whenever you feel the urge to think again: but what if I did this? Look back 3 years, and notice that this doesn't work out. If you really want to switch, use that want to finish the current project faster. You can reduce scope, but always finish.

throwaway0asd 3 years ago |

It comes down to persistence and originality. If the given idea is original and the value is worthy I will follow it at great expense.

For example I maintain a peer to peer application that used to use HTTP for all its traffic. I found an alternate transmission scheme that dramatically increased both performance and simplicity but it took me about a year to implement from scratch across all aspects of the application. This was a great effort and at first appeared incredibly fragile and broken, but once I really nailed down the concept it became far more durable that other more common transmission techniques.

I have been working on this application for just over three years and have almost no users. I keep going because now the application can do amazing things that everyone else cannot.

throwaway57382 3 years ago |

The last time I was paralylized for 3 weeks and decided on one of the ideas I had. I think to this date that this has been the best decision according to the knowledge that I had at the time. Nevertheless, after 1 year of working on it, I had to take a pause due to life circumstances, literally a 1 year pause (which is still in progress). During that time, I could not help but think about other ideas. I'm not 100% sure what I will end up doing, but it kinda looks like I'm taking the first product, rebuilding it into a completely different (and much simpler) product that will put me on the path to launch the product (much more complex) I decided to skip on earlier.

I don't know, it's like. You have to keep building, keep the momentum up and do some periodic direction checks, but don't let it get out of hand with your time. I would be building my first product to this day if I was not forced to take a pause. But since I took that pause, my knowledge got updated and all things considered I think I will be building the idea I decided to skip earlier.

All product ideas that I have are complex, and even the simplest one requires some 5,000h total to launch. I learned that if even something that I considered simple takes time, maybe I overshat the complexity of the more complex product and if it's so much time and life sacrifice, I will pick the idea I'm more interested on and don't mind it taking more time. If it fails, at least I know that I did not kept anything back. If the simpler idea failed, I would be full of regret that, it failed anyway, I should have pushed for the thing I was more interested about.

I hope that once I invest in a product enough time, there will be no going back and no reason to question direction anymore. I spent 1,500h on this one, and it's still such a long way to go that scratching it can be justified, especially since I'm re-using some of that code. But once I settle on that more complex idea, push some 3,000h, I will know that there's no going back and I need to go all the way to 10,000h or whatever it will take to build it.

That said, I think it's valuable to question too much. So much in this game depends on what you build. No matter how shiny the product is, if it's useless.

raydiatian 3 years ago |

There’s the “pivot or persevere” concept from the “Lean Startup” book. Basically, if you’re stalled out, you step back, ask why, craft alternatives, compare their relative qualities, and decide which you’ll go pursue in the next time window. So basically just every now and then have a self convo of “how’s this actually going”, and set a deadline for when you’ll decide to persevere or pivot.

It’s worked for me loads of times, the important thing is that it both encourages and validates project momentum, which is probably the most important thing of all.

kazinator 3 years ago | |

"Pivot or Persevere" ... the dating reality show where hot-but-slightly-daft normal people go on dates with engineers!

betwixthewires 3 years ago |

I juggle things too, I think we all do.

I've found nothing motivates me to finish something like the prospect of being able to use it myself. If it will make my life better I'll work on it til it's done. Now, I don't build SaaS stuff, so this makes sense.

Just pick something that you'd use, that would make your life better, and build it for yourself, and then see if other people could benefit from it as well.

cercatrova 3 years ago |

I set a time limit to ship whatever I can, like a week for example. Magically the work compresses to fill the allotted time, Parkinson's Law. It's a good way to finish and ship rather than get mired by decision paralysis, which I had, just like you.

andrei_says_ 3 years ago |

A recurring idea that doesn’t give you rest combined with enthusiasm.

These are the driving forces that will take you through the ups and downs, not some kind of magical willpower or merit.

aristofun 3 years ago |

Chances are you don’t actually want to build things.