old projects and new
Some time ago, I looked at the long list of accumulated projects, and I decided that the only reasonable decision to make would be to declare project bankruptcy and start over, wiping the slate clean.
And it’s proven more difficult than I thought, for many reasons. One is the sunk cost fallacy. A few of these projects I started a long time ago, years (or even decades in a few cases), and it’s hard to ignore all of that expended effort.
And if I stare in the mirror, there is then the question of why I’ve held onto these projects for so long, without bringing them to a state of completion, and that’s a great question to which I don’t have a good answer. In part, it might be that procrastination becomes a habit in itself and that’s a habit I’ve been practicing, too assiduously.
Another reason perhaps is that some of them are just interesting. With lots of interesting projects, there is the difficulty of focusing on just one of them, leaving all of the others watching from the sidelines. But that then is the discipline to practice this year.
Yet another reason might be that the projects are just interesting, which is why they ended up on the list in the first place.
As we approach the end of the year, it’s the time of year that many people start thinking about resolutions for the year to come. But I don’t like waiting until the new year, and so the time has come to get out the pruning shears and start removing some of these old, dead projects, so that there is room for new projects to bloom.
multijimbo 