I'm like this. I have started literal hundreds of projects, most of them game ideas. Projects are never _really_ finished, but through the years I have become better at leaving them at a satisfying point, even making some of my projects public. For me, this was a journey. Here's a few lessons I learned for me:
- Figure out why you are doing this in the first place. Usually, my core desire behind a project idea is not at all "to make money" or "help people", but something more simple. It's to figure out how to do something, or to quench my own curiosity.
- I realized I have a near-unending pool of ideas, but I can just do one at a time. Which one to pick? For a while, I chose them based on project size; how easily could I gratify that core desire? How quickly could I be happy with this project? Almost any project that I'd think would take more than a weekend would be sent back to the pile. Sometimes it took a while to distill the core desire behind a project idea, to really see why it was interesting to me.
- Doing this also taught me a lot about how to make projects smaller. This was extremely freeing. I don't have to worry about losing work -- I'll lose maybe up to a day of typing, and the real value was working on the project anyway, not necessarily the produced artifact. I also realized I can do many projects with nothing but a browser and a text editor, and the more I used this small tool set, the deeper my understanding got and the more I could do in a weekend project.
Over time, I've 'finished' many of these projects, and I've also started to learn that finishing really is a skill in itself -- something that takes practice. More of my projects nowadays are at least somewhat ready for public consumption, and I'm still getting better at this. I still start projects that I don't finish. If an idea is cool enough, I'll still give it a try. Some project ideas were so cool/fun to work on that they would just be able to capture my attention for the weeks or sometimes even months they asked for to get them somewhere (most recently, that's https://kaesve.nl/projects/shells/). Some projects can't capture all that attention at once, but are still fun enough to revisit. They take years, but slowly move forward. And if I abandon a project, that's okay too; it usually means I found a new, shorter-term project, or that I realize that that core desire behind that project idea wasn't so satisfying after all.
- Figure out why you are doing this in the first place. Usually, my core desire behind a project idea is not at all "to make money" or "help people", but something more simple. It's to figure out how to do something, or to quench my own curiosity. - I realized I have a near-unending pool of ideas, but I can just do one at a time. Which one to pick? For a while, I chose them based on project size; how easily could I gratify that core desire? How quickly could I be happy with this project? Almost any project that I'd think would take more than a weekend would be sent back to the pile. Sometimes it took a while to distill the core desire behind a project idea, to really see why it was interesting to me. - Doing this also taught me a lot about how to make projects smaller. This was extremely freeing. I don't have to worry about losing work -- I'll lose maybe up to a day of typing, and the real value was working on the project anyway, not necessarily the produced artifact. I also realized I can do many projects with nothing but a browser and a text editor, and the more I used this small tool set, the deeper my understanding got and the more I could do in a weekend project.
Over time, I've 'finished' many of these projects, and I've also started to learn that finishing really is a skill in itself -- something that takes practice. More of my projects nowadays are at least somewhat ready for public consumption, and I'm still getting better at this. I still start projects that I don't finish. If an idea is cool enough, I'll still give it a try. Some project ideas were so cool/fun to work on that they would just be able to capture my attention for the weeks or sometimes even months they asked for to get them somewhere (most recently, that's https://kaesve.nl/projects/shells/). Some projects can't capture all that attention at once, but are still fun enough to revisit. They take years, but slowly move forward. And if I abandon a project, that's okay too; it usually means I found a new, shorter-term project, or that I realize that that core desire behind that project idea wasn't so satisfying after all.