Sign in Subscribe

F2F #11: Side-project burnout

Here's a way to self-diagnose side-project burnout, but not a single solution for it.

F2F #11: Side-project burnout
Photo by Andy Watkins / Unsplash

I am a creative person. I find myself having ideas for new apps or projects nowadays. Sometimes it's just features for apps I use.

For instance, today I thought it'd be cool to modify people's voices on my podcast app. I find some people's voices to be annoying, so I'd change their tone, rhythm or colour, even. High-pitched and histrionic people bug the hell out of me.

Lately, I've been noodling with the idea of building an app that stores all my personal data and I can converse with it. Sort of a "meGPT".

The list goes on.

Origins

Technology enables creative minds like mine to learn virtually anything and start all sorts of problems. Every day, we lower the entry barriers in yet another sector. While this is key to progressing as species, it's also a double-edged sword.

In fact, risk aversion is correlated with personality type and cognitive ability, which is related to knowledge of a topic. Several studies have found significant relationships between these factors:

  1. Personality type and risk aversion:
  1. Cognitive ability and risk aversion:
  1. Financial literacy and risk aversion:

I myself consider to be introverted and generally speaking not open to new experiences. I shouldn't be very tolerant of risk. In general, I don't risk much and quite frankly, I take low risk enterprises all the time... except in finance.

Maybe it's because I have little to zero understanding of finance and I'm thus unburneded by biases, but my wildest gambles and risks, I've done them with finance. By not fully understanding the consequences, I have taken more unbiased decisions (albeit more dangerous!). Maybe it's because I haven't had the tools to calculate upside vs. downside properly and have therefore applied an involuntary lateral thinking.

Be as it may, I have ended up with too many side-projects. Too many to handle, and too many to see them die. And that causes me stress.

The problem

I am feeling burnt out by all the projects I've started but never completed. I have cluttered my brain with half-assed ideas that were easy to start but impossible to complete. Or maybe they lost their appeal. Or maybe something more urgent came up. Or maybe I am in another moment in my life with higher priorities, but I am not able to declutter my mental headspace from unfinished projects.

Todoist
79 tasks for today - 75 of which have been postponed till tomorrow

These abandoned projects sit there, occupying mental bandwidth and encumbering me with a somber sense of guilt that is too heavy to bear and too difficult to let go of.

In this post, you will not find the solutions to this because, quite frankly, I know the theory but I haven't applied it successfully. We, humans, are very good at telling other people how not to do things but the harsh reality is: even if you know the theory, you need to get hurt to know the lesson. Curiosity killed the cat.

Look, just in the last five years I've started and abandoned an investment firm (Winning Capital), a Facebook group for freelancers in Barcelona, a podcast about music, a punk rock band, a website listing alternatives to publicly traded companies in Spain, a blockchain project to trace your pokémon, a marketplace for bird cages, a website called stonksoverflow.com that I still don't know what kind of content I wanted to have in it and Satan knows what else.

The main problem comes from not actually killing the projects but to let them linger a slow death. I gradually stop working on them until they disappear from my weekly workload but they keep sending me reminders of their existence when I see their repository on Github, a folder inside my mac, the domain listed on Godaddy, an email from a service I use remining me to renew their subscription and more. These nudges add up to the feeling of guilt and put more pressure on getting back to the project - yet in my case, they cause the opposite: a sense of rejection.

Godaddy email
Oops - not getting any more reminders about this one, it seems!

Effects

What are the effects of this burnout?

  • Constant tiredness.
  • Lack of motivation.
  • Procrastination and endlessly pursuing low-hanging fruits.
  • Blurry mind & unclear planning.
  • Anxiety caused by excessive workload.

If you feel some of the above (or all of them), welcome to the club.

Accepting the problem is the first step

As I mentioned, I can't give you tips and tricks to solve this. I do have them but I don't feel they've worked for me. I might not have applied them properly yet, even, so I won't pretend to have a cure for this just to get more engagement and virality.

I think that admitting it is a first step, and doing it publicly is a second step. It might help other people to realise they have the same problem, and we can get together, brainstorm and help each other. So, if you happen to be in the same situation, kindly reach out and let's talk about it!

And now, onto the regular update of other miscelleaneous items!

Interesting stuff

This week, I've really liked the following contents:

If you're not releasing then you're just journaling. If you're not posting it publicly, if you're just keeping things to yourself, then you need to admit that's just a journal. You're not really being a writer, you're just journaling for yourself. I think to be a writer, the unspoken necessity of that definition is that you have to release it to the world, otherwise it's just your diary.

– Derek Sivers in Derek Sivers Reveals His Writing Secrets For His Forthcoming Book, Useful Not True (~30:00)

My projects & asks

Until next week! Thanks for reading!