Let all your effort be directed to something, let it keep that end in view. It is not activity that disrupts people, but false conceptions of things that drive them mad.
– Seneca, on tranquility of life, 12.5
One of the hardest problems of building something large is reducing it to manageable bits and pieces that can be made in the time between meetings for actual work, or in the after-hours for side gigs and spare time projects.
One thing that often puts off people working is not having any of these manageable bits to finish up. Another thing that can put of working on a project is being at the mercy of the road map already planned 10 years ahead.
It’s a balancing act.
One thing that is for sure is that important projects need traction. They need regular attention, also when everything else in life comes crashing down. When a project gets attention, it is so much easier to get caught up in the project the days when the stars align and we get into the flow.
Maybe the trick is to have an “ignition list”. A list of small pieces of work that can be done in half an hour or so. For the stressful days, this is merely what is done. For the other days, these items are what ignites the flow process.
It is kind of leaving a small fixable syntax error in the code overnight. This ensures something easy to get started with in the morning bootstrapping the day.
Maybe the first item on the ignition list is to build the ignition list?