Execution and Follow-through

There’s a recurrent issue in my life that I keep dealing with. It comes up in my professional work, in my hobbies, in my personal projects. The issue is one of motivation, execution, and follow-through.

I think it’s fairly common for people in my line of work to get many ideas for projects they want to work on, start, and never finish. It’s ADD, writ large. We always chase the new and the shiny. Personally, I tend to work on a project just long enough that the idea is fleshed out and I feel like I’ve worked out the kinks, or just put in enough effort to convince myself that I could, if I really needed to, carry this off. I rarely seem to be able to pull through and finish the project. It’s not The Dip. This is pre-Dip quitting that I’m talking about.

Derek Sivers said that ideas are just a multiplier of execution. Without the execution and follow-through, the original idea isn’t worth much. There’s no point to start a blog if you won’t write in it. There’s no value to a great website idea if you won’t build it. It helps no one.

Here’s the problem: ideas are easy. Great ideas are hard, but you can’t tell the great from the mundane until you make it real and build it, write it, paint it, whatever. Implementation always brings up unanticipated challenges and it’s the process of working through those challenges and actually producing something that adds value to the world.

I’m convinced that execution and follow-through are critical, so why is it still so hard to get past the idea stage? The problem comes down to motivation. My day has two giant 8 hour blocks that are pretty much unmovable: work and sleep. As far as personal projects go, work and sleep are giant chunks of no-man’s land that eat up two-thirds of my day. The remaining time is precious and valuable, and personal projects compete with the mundane like, say, eating, cooking, and the dreaded cleaning. Somehow in there we need to squeeze in a social life, a family, and other needs. Writing a blog post or building a new web app require large dedicated chunks of time and concentration. I find that as I get older and real-life creeps up on me, it becomes harder and harder to put aside those dedicated times for hobby work.

I’m getting tired of leaving a trail of started but never finished projects. I need some simple advice on how to execute and follow-through on my ideas, at least some of the time so that I don’t get overloaded. I can take a stab at what’s needed:

1. Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize: Ideas are easy and on a particularly creative day I’ll have several good ones that I want to pursue. I need to prioritize them along with my “real life” commitments and come to accept that I won’t ever work on some of them. Better than trashing them, write them down in a tickler file and look at them when I don’t have anything to work on and want to start something new.
2. Block off project time: I don’t think I’ll ever get project work done unless I can set aside a solid block of time to concentrate. Real life demands will always grow to consume any available block of time. By setting aside a chunk ahead of time, I can partition off everything else and keep it from spreading.
3. ???
4. Profit!

I’d love to hear any other ideas for increasing follow-through and execution on hobby projects.