Presentation Paralysis

I have a presentation to do tomorrow that I have been procrastinating on for the better of three or four weeks.

The stakes for the presentation are small but they are enough to stress me out. The deadline is almost here as well and I barely have anything ready to demo either. This ordeal is essentially totally caused by my own expectations for what I should produce and what I would be satisfied with. I am rarely satisfied with the work that I produce and when I am it is because I have usually given it a consistent shot and accomplished something stupidely grand; I expected not to fulfill these expectations before even starting the project in the first place.

Types of Involvement

>There will be final time you put down your pen.

Time does not work how you expect. Just because a long deadline is set for a task, it does not mean you will spend your time on that task. Often the opposite will occur. When you are working on more open ended things as so many in the Creatorsphere do, there is a temptation to tell yourself that you are working on your project if you are thinking about it. This is passive involvement. I call actively writing down your thoughts about the project: active involvement; When you have decided to focus on the core project itself, the nitty gritty parts that is: hyperactive involvement. All three modes are important for a project.

Keep in mind these types are flavours on a spectrum of involvement with your project and they are not a range of good to bad, and they should not even be a range for when you should do what. There is no set period when you should do passive, or active, or hyperactive invovlement. That is an integral part of your project journey. I think that this concept of types just gives you another lens from which can reveal the colours of your journey you have not taken to delight in.

Passive Involvement

You can think passively, and yet deeply for years on a subject. Mulling over it with other people. A great deal of my insight into my own projects and especially this project have come from just having the discussions with my friends. Finding the time to just sit and think about what you are doing can be difficult because you might be immediately tempted to just work on the 'thing' itself. This manner of development has been called 'Hammock Driven' by Rich Hickey.

There is a great video lecture about this manner of development. That said do this too long and it can leave your users in a perpetual beta (just look at the current state of Clojure Spec). There is the ultimate deadline to worry about afterall. There will be final time you put down your pen. There is always a deadline for a project even if you do not realize there is one. That said that we should really enjoy journeys more as developers and creators.

Active Involvement

Beyond simply riding the waves of passive involvement which itself has its precipes and troughs we can look to active development. During active development we record and organize the thoughts that we have had. Not all the thoughts either. Usually there is simply too much to think through. This state for some might suffer from the opposite problem, in which case perhaps passive development may need to occur or could help. Active involment can also include planning and scheduling.

I do active development once I have thoughts and discussions I have had with people that I particularly liked; And I want to both preserve but also investigate that in a far more structured way. To fit an analogy to the Bluesky infrastructure, active development is like a filter on the Firehouse. That said, ideas that you did not encounter during a passive invovled session will often emerge during an active session. Planning and structure cause one to investigate ideas in a way that we cannot easily do otherwise.

There is more to write here; Yet there is that deadline I told you about. Time for the hyperactive phase to hit.