Projects That Fail To Get Off The Ground -- And What to Do About It

I often have difficulty sustaining ambitious projects. I am a creative and industrious person and I come up with a lot of cool projects to work on. Unfortunately, most of them die after the initial burst of inspiration. I know I’m not alone on this. I’ve been thinking lately about why this is the case, and how I can solve this problem. I’ve found certain circumstances where the “lose momentum and become dormant” problem does not apply.

There are a few reasons why certain projects fail to Get Off Of The Ground, and why others succeed. I currently have two similar projects that are cruising along quite successfully -- my deviant art gallery, and this blog. They share similar characteristics that promote my continued involvement.

1) Initial start-up effort is small.
2) How to continue the project is obvious and simple. (Write an article, or upload a photograph).
3) Working on the project is easy even if I haven’t thought about it for a while.
4) Updates are instantly available to the audience. (Instant gratification for my labor).

All of these characteristics are the opposite of the projects I have failed to get off the ground. Here’s an example -- I like to design games. I’m frequently inspired to design strategy games, only to build the parts that interested me most before I lose steam trying to figure out how to tie it all together.

1) Start up effort is large. You have to develop a pretty solid rule set, and then physically build the game before you can start playing.
2) How to continue the project is not obvious or simple. Its very easy to get stuck with scope problem in the design phase. Try to do too much, and it becomes overwhelming to keep track of everything. Try to do too little, and its not original enough to be worth working on.
3) If you’ve let the project go for a while, the complexity makes it difficult to recall the concepts that had made sense earlier.
4) Working on the project has no external rewards unless you finish at least a playable version.

I think a few solutions to this exist though. Here’s 5 ideas that I think would help. These are largely influenced by project management concepts that I’ve learned from being a professional software developer.

a) Have a well defined roadmap to lay out all the wide-swaths of what needs to be accomplished before you’re ‘done enough’. Make sure to complete this step before you lose the initial inspiration. If you can do this, you’re halfway there. I think.
b) Try to build the roadmap in such a way so that it has parts which don’t heavily depend on each other. That way you can dissect the project into manageable parts, and mostly forget about them once they’re in good shape. That way, you won’t get overwhelmed keeping track of everything as the project grows.
c) Always keep a written record of your progress. Even if this is just a simple paragraph or two, or a listing of items in a spreadsheet, it’ll help you immensely later on.
d) Maintain a task list which always contains some easy things to do, so that when you come back from a break, you’ll have something to ease into.
e) Try to work with other people who are enthusiastic about the project too. Even if this is just in the form of having people look at the project as it is coming along and say – “Hey man this is cool. Keep it up.”

I would love to hear other people’s thoughts on this subject. Any ideas on what might be missing are welcome, as are things that have worked for you. I just can’t imagine that pure passion alone is the reason behind all successful people’s success.

In fact, I’m my own guinea-pig. I’ve started a new, fairly large and ambitious project, but certainly something I am capable of doing in my spare time within six months or a year. I’m going to try out my new suggestions here, and see how it pans out. I’ve already created a basic roadmap. I’ve contained the scope of what I want to achieve before I’ll consider it complete. I may post more on this project as it progresses.