Hacking my head empty
Turning ideas into hacks, so I can forget and move on…
It happened again a little week ago. It came out of nothing as usual, and I’d not anticipated it. My head was exploding while I was having dinner and not mentally present, yet prentending to be.
I get dozens of small and big ideas throughout an ordinary day. Stuff to try, small things to build, product ideas, traction/distribution ideas and ideas for blog posts.
The problem is that I’m not good at letting go of the thought. Even though I am now better at just ignoring thoughts, letting them pass by as conversations in a public space, the same thoughts usually gets back to me an hour or two later.
I usually ignore it again, but later on I start thinking back and try to recall what it was. And that’s where it goes wrong, because I have nothing real to relate my thoughts and ideas to. Everything is so intangible that I can hardly hold on to the thought, yet I just can’t stop.
I feel like being interrupted when heads down trying to solve a problem (programming), and everything is back to square one and frustration sets in and this is when my head is exploding.
Already keeping a code-base or two in One’s head, being distracted by thoughts is a huge problem to me.
About a year ago, I realized that I needed to embrace my thoughts instead of trying to keep them down. Most of the time this means churning out a small hack that is a remote realization of my thought.
At that time, the thoughts that were troubling me was how you could visualize intense location based activity during events such as the Tour de France, the World Cup or demonstrations.
After spending a considerable amount of time on research, I decided to just do a small and ugly hack instead of wasting more time.
I used the Twitter Streaming API to receive live location based tweets, and it ended up being pretty powerful (in terms of being real time).
It turns out, that for me getting my thoughts into something even remotely real is such a big relief. Instead of thinking and researching it to death, I set aside a little time and make something real out of it.
This makes it much easier for me to let go and move on. This particular hack above have not troubled me since. I don’t care about it, and I guess that is the main takeaway for me — to filter out what I’m not passionate about and find the problem that I truly wants to spent my time on solving!
