I spent most of my life working on projects and never releasing them. In large part, I was afraid of judgement from other’s and also myself. I wanted to put things out there which represented my true capabilities and didn’t want to tie things to my name which I wasn’t proud of.
Over the course of the past few years I’ve had a drastic shift in the way I think about all of this. In part it’s been due to this blog, it’s also been influenced by my involvement in open-source projects.
There’s a common saying that you should release your project’s at 80% completion or you’ll never release them at all. What happens if you struggle to get to the 80%?
Do you just lower the number until it hits a point where you are able to put something out there? If you do a big release at a lower completion rate people may judge it as an unpolished finished project and discard it. You can put title’s to it such as alpha or beta, but there’s still a lot of pressure and expectations surrounding it.
Working in public
I’d like to suggest something a bit radical - forget your pride and work in public from day 1. Create an expectation with the people interacting with your work that everything will be a bit rough around the edges, that your work is exploratory, that they can witness your process and even be a part of it through engaging with you.
I strongly believe that this approach has huge benefits, ranging from increased engagement with your community, it feels more authentic, you get micro rewards through social validation and the completion of smaller tasks which can sustain the project longer term and it fosters collaboration between people working on similar problems.
Release drafts, don’t edit them too much and make another
A big part of this is not polishing drafts too much, focus on reducing the barrier for you to create work and publish it and if something really begins to stick, update the drafts and refine them into something really polished.
If you pump out things that are unfinished frequently, you’ll build up an intuitive sense of how to create things well the first time around rather than needing to iterate on it over and over.
It’s like practicing art, rather than drawing a single face and spending 100 hours getting it perfect, draw 1000 faces and dedicate a fraction of the time to each. If you make a mistake, just draw it again. You’ll explore ideas and techniques much quicker and you’ll improve at a faster rate.
Building blocks
Another aspect of this philosophy involves scope - what are micro projects you can complete and put out there quickly? I don’t know about you, but having worked on many things and not released them does all sorts of things my own self worth, I feel like a failure, unreliable, etc.
A way that I love to think about large scale projects is to break them down into their smallest components and figure out how to turn each of the smaller parts into their own micro project you can release as something stand alone.
For example if you’re building a dating app, the three core elements of this are the matching algorithm, chat & a profile. Building a simple messaging app and putting it out there first makes sense as it’s a small slice of the whole.
Reducing the barrier of entry
To re-iterate, a huge part of this philosophy is to reduce the barrier to putting things out there and getting feedback from people about your work. Even in writing this blog, I often feel blocked, the medium is inherently a large commitment. Email’s are sent to followers and it requires a lot of time and thought to write something coherent.
Compare a blog post to say… a Tweet. I can spend a few minutes crafting a Tweet and put it out there. Sometimes I want to write something in between the two, micro notes relating to a subject that doesn’t necessarily have enough meat on it to be a full post. In these situations I want something more like a micro-wiki or similar.
Restrictions breed creativity
Another aspect of my philosophy of work relates to restrictions, I came to this conclusion through my work on pixel-art as a child and early teen. The medium has all sorts of restrictions, image size and limited colour palettes. You can layer on as many other arbitrary restrictions as you’d like.
Restrictions breed creativity. If you ever get overwhelmed by all of the possibilities and find it hard navigating a space, add so me restrictions that you find interesting or even arbitrarily. How will you design solutions that fit those specs? You will be guaranteed to create work which is innovative and has a unique take on it compared to other projects in the space. You’ll also be able to complete your projects quicker as the restrictions will often limit the complexity of what you’re building.
Now, this is just a personal philosophy and there’s much more to it, but I’ll save that for another blog post. I hope you’ve enjoyed this and found it useful. I’d love to hear about what ways of working, work for you in the comments or via Twitter.
See y’all next time!
