Too Many Projects

Sometimes my own coding ability drives me insane. Problems need solving. But I can't solve them.

Today I tried, for the whole day to do a trial move over to SQLite from MySQL of everything held in the database that backs up this blog. Could I do it easily? No.

My problem is routed entirely in my personality. I am quite willing to start new things but I often do this before I finish off another project. So in effect, I get nothing done.

Because I'm always trying to avoid finishing things.

You see, it's much nicer to start new things than finish old things. Old things are boring.

If something fails to constantly interest me, then I can quite easily forget about it and move on to the next thing and leaving that old thing, sitting there unfinished.

The perfect example is today. I haven't finished learning MySQL properly yet, but I'm wanting to move everything over to SQLite as I perceive it to be much better and faster and I feel that without putting it into mainstream usage, that I won't get the most out of learning it.

The trouble with this idea though is that it means that that's another book half read. Another thing half understood. I really need to do something about.

Steeped deep into this is my habit of trying to do many projects at once. Because I seem to spend more time thinking about doing things than actually doing them then I end up loosing track, and making more notes than I can handle - I mean physically, rather than mentally here, paper and electrical devices are not exactly in short supply.

The thing about running one project at once is that you can apply everything to one thing, then move on to the next, taking with you what you have gotten out of the last project and put it into this next project. For example, if I learnt Ruby coding a CMS for this company a week ago, then next week - two weeks later I can go ahead and apply this to the blogging engine that I create, shortening the time to almost live as I've already learnt it, even if it isn't as fresh in my mind as it could be.

I feel that in someways it in inherently stuck in the way I currently do things. To some degrees I am always on the look out for new projects and this isn't a problem because these are easy to brainstorm, write a little about them then throw them in a folder somewhere for me to pick up in 6 months time when I am bored and need something to do. This as a system works well. I have 7 project ideas written down for when I want to go back and have a think about them.

The trouble is, once you look at all of it at once, I am infact trying to do 4 completely different projects all at once right at the the same time. For someone that procrastinates as much as I do, that isn't so effective.

So, for me to actually give something more than a long rant out of this post, I am going to suggest that having too many projects is a rather bad idea. But having none is about as bad.

Projects themselves aren't bad. It's what you do with them. Two of mine are design projects and have been there for a rather long time. About 6 weeks. For me and a design project that seems like a rather long time.

What I am going to do is cut down on how many I try to do at once. That is of course once I get these completed. And I'm going to finish reading my MySQL book which I started 3 months ago.

Short of just ticking off bits on a list, rather it cuts down how much you do at once, by cutting down, it doesn't look so bad when I spend the whole day trying to convert from one database type to another.