100 copies of famous paintings with the subjects swapped for self portraits.
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Tag: projects
New York’s network infrastructure is a lot like the city itself: messy, sprawling, and at times near-incomprehensible. However, the city’s tendency toward flux is a strange blessing for the infrastructure sightseer: markings and remnants of the network are almost everywhere, once you know how to look for them.
And book!
It’s fun to stumble on dedicated little web projects like this. It’s such a niche project that only someone who really cared would bother making it.
Makes me think of a tweet I saw recently that the world is basically made of people’s random passion projects.
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Listen to yourself
[I]f you feel anxious or worried about progress on personal projects, don’t feel that you have to continue.
👏 A good reminder that personal projects are not obligations, and sometimes quitting a project is the right choice.
You cannot pull apart an uncracked egg, because it’s smooth and edgeless. The whole point of the first step is to change the egg into the kind of egg you can pull apart, by giving it a place for your fingertips to go.
I like this analogy for a perspective shift to make it easier to start something. I find I often need to start working on a project to figure out how to approach the whole thing. I’m working on a new website now and many of the steps I wrote out for myself before starting have turned out to be dependent on other steps I didn’t think of, or that I thought could come later. But that’s fine, I’m adapting my plan as I go.
Here’s two intuitions I have:
Almost-everything takes longer than I think it will
Longer things take disproportionately longer than I think they will
I think many of my projects take longer than planned not because the work itself takes longer than I think it will, but because of long stretches of time where I do nothing at all — something comes up, weeks go by, and suddenly I realise I’ve made no progress at all on that-thing-I-was-working-on.
Yep, that rings true 😂
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Too many pets
I used to have too many pets.
Each time I adopted one, I was fully in love. I was enamored with the potential. Each new pet was meant to be my constant companion. So I would take it home, and love it. But eventually I would discover a new pet, and the process would repeat.
One at a time, reluctantly, I’d set one free, or find it a new home with someone who was really going to give this pet 100% of their love. I mourned the loss of possibility with each one as I said goodbye…
Before, I’d glance at each pet and feel love but guilt for not giving it more time. Now, I picture what could have been, and just enjoy the daydream.
In keeping with the crux of Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: getting more productive won’t let us do everything we want. We have to choose – and the missing out is what gives the things we do do more meaning for being chosen (hopefully).