My time spent developing my passion project hasn’t been continuous since the time I first started working on it. The first iteration lasted about a month and was a mad rush to cobble something together to mark the momentous “milestone” of 100 blog posts. I then spent the next couple months experimenting with Silverlight managing to replicate and extend the base feature set out to a point where I felt I was making progress. I then went on a 6 week hiatus from developing Geon to work on The Plan which, whilst making me a decent sized profit, never turned out to be the ticket to freedom I had hoped it would be. After taking a month off after that and coming back to look at Geon I couldn’t help but think that I was going about things in all the wrong ways, and came up with a completely new design.
This, I’ve found, is a common trend for me. Unless I continually work on a project I’ll always end up questioning the idea until I end up wondering what the point of doing it in the first place was. Initially this was quite good as whilst the first few iterations of Geon showed solid progress they were in all honesty horrid applications. However it was devastating for overall progress as the paradigm shifts I underwent during these times of developmental absence meant that the new vision was wholly incompatible with the old and I could see no way other than starting anew to get them back in line again. This is why the first2 iterations didn’t have any form of user logins and the third was such a horrible process that I don’t blame anyone for signing up for it.
I had thought that short breaks were immune to this idea as I had often taken a weekend or two off when a family event called or I was starting to feel burned out. However I hadn’t had the chance to do much work on Lobaco over the past 2 weeks thanks to me being otherwise occupied and those little tendrils of other worldly perspective started to creep in. Maybe it was the booze fueled weekend where I had a list of 5 other potentially marketable ideas or maybe it was just me pining for another break but suddenly I felt like there was so many other things I should be doing than pursuing my almost 2 year old idea. I let myself think that I could take part of the weekend off to work on one of those ideas but for some reason I just kept working on Lobaco.
I’m not sure if it was my persistence or hitting the submit on my application to Y-Combinator that did it but instead of pursuing those ideas that had tempted me all week long I just fired up Xcode and started plugging away. Whilst not my most productive weekend ever I did manage to tick off 2 more features for the iPhone client, leaving about 3 to go before my deadline of the end of March. I think the combination of a solid code base (that has all those rudimentary things done so I don’t have to spend time researching them) and almost half a year of iOS development under my belt is enough to keep the momentum going, making sure I don’t give up on this version until it reaches 1.0.
I used to think that time away from coding was just as valuable as time spent in code but that doesn’t seem to be holding as true as it used to be. Sure my first breaks led to radical changes in my vision for the end product (and is responsible for the Lobaco that exists today) but once you hit that sweet spot time away can be quite destructive, especially if you’re as prone as I am to distraction by new ideas. Thankfully the last 6 months of momentum aren’t lost on me and 2 weeks away wasn’t enough to distract me from my end goal. It would have been to easy to start procrastinating again without realizing it.
