Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, January 9, 2006:
The Discipline
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.Probably the number one challenge to a programmer starting a business is maintaining your discipline. Programmers are naturally creative people. Maybe not in the art sense, but in terms of always wanting to create new things and explore new ideas. This aspect of the programmers makeup is simultaneously our greatest strength and our greatest weakness.
If you're going to start a company you need to be able to focus 100% of your creative energy into your product and marketing. There's simply no time to be distracted with other interesting ideas. Once committed to developing a product it's so important to stay on track. It's probably the hardest part of getting things rolling. I've struggled with this from the very beginning.
Since starting HelpSpot I've installed at least 3 wiki's with ideas for ISV oriented websites, started coding a PHP system for handling directories of information at least 3 times (i need this for something else I shouldn't be working on!), started a stock oriented blog, and wrote up some plans for another software product. I'm happy to report that none of these lasted more than a few hours before I kicked myself and stopped working on them. Any could have spiraled out of control and lasted several weeks before I realized I was off track.
I don't have any great techniques for preventing these "attacks" of creativity, but I do find that channelling that energy someplace else can help. For instance, I often write a blog post when I find my mind wandering off to new programming ideas. This gives me a creative release that's also a worthwhile thing to spend time on.
Discussion
Man, have I been struggling with this problem. I'm glad to hear that others suffer form creative overload as well.
My recent attempt at controlling this is to carry around a journal/notebook. Everytime I get an idea that needs to be scratched, I write it down. I allow myself to write all the details that spill out. Usually, this takes care of it and the urge ends there.
The benefit to this is if later down the road the ideas dry out, I can go back to the journal and mine it for data.
Created by Jon Trainer on 01.09.2006 9:01 am
I think a lot of us are in the same boat. I found a method to curb my creative tangents. When I have a sudden urge for a "great idea", I start writing a spec for it (or start adding feature ideas to existing specs).
Adding a healthy dose of drudgery to the creative process keeps it in check. Plus, it's a good way to keep track of my future product ideas.
Created by Nick Hebb on 01.09.2006 9:01 am
Yes starting to write things down helps me as well. Usually I start to realize that it wouldn't be something I can do in 10 minutes a day and would require lots of work to do it right and that cures me.
Interesting that you both keep the ideas around. Unless they're HelpSpot related I've tended to discard them to avoid thinking about them again, though there are a few which are just stuck in my head. I haven't found a good way to purge them yet!
Created by Ian on 01.09.2006 9:01 am
If you use a process like "Getting Things Done" (aka GTD), you tend to focus on the stuff on your lists. When a new thing comes up, it goes on a list. Those new ideas will constantly be fighting with the other things on your lists, which makes it clearer where you should spend your time... at least, it does to me. That's why my blog was on the default WordPress theme for so long! (and even now is just running a stock K2.)
Created by Kevin Dangoor on 01.09.2006 9:01 am
[...] Ian Landsman notices that it’s easy to become distracted: Probably the number one challenge to a programmer starting a business is maintaining your discipline. Programmers are naturally creative people. Maybe not in the art sense, but in terms of always wanting to create new things and explore new ideas. This aspect of the programmers makeup is simultaneously our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. [...]
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Created by Startup Fever » Blog Archive » The Dis on 01.09.2006 9:01 am