The Excitement Backlog

Note: I somehow missed publishing this on the 15th of July. I think that only underscores the problem.

I took two weeks off at my day job recently. I was excited to have all this free time on my hands — I’d get some projects done around the house, I’d get to work on Cheqin, and I’d get to take a little overnight trip with my wife.

We took our overnight trip. It was great; we went out to a little ski-resort village, did some kayaking and walking around, had some good food and got a nice break from the day-to-day routine.

Everything else… didn’t happen.

Honestly, I’m not surprised. Frustrated, maybe, but not surprised.

If you don’t do a great job of setting aside time during your usual workweek to tackle things, why would you expect to do better during your time off?

Or, here’s a better question: if you’re having trouble focusing, why is that?

Maybe life is just really hectic for you right now. It has been for me. I had a headache for the first four days of my time off, from decompressing I guess.

But maybe, just maybe, there’s something more. Maybe something is sabotaging your focus.

I’m usually super excited to kick off a new project. I spend all my free time thinking about it, I steal whatever minutes I can get to work on it, my journals end up filled with sketches and ideas and notes.

And yet… that hasn’t really been the case with Cheqin, the Mac app I was going to build as a financial toolkit for indie devs. I had a couple of ideas, but I mostly felt like I was going through the motions.

That’s not a good sign.

So, in what feels like yet another change to what I want to do, I'm pivoting this project. It's still going to be a finance app, but it'll be focused on personal finance. I'll talk more about this later, but I'm already feeling way more motivated to work on it. It's got me excited. I keep thinking of features to add. It'll be an iOS and Mac app. I know what I want the app icon to look like. It won't be yet another budgeting app.

Okay, but Two Common Cents Club is supposed to be about running a microbusiness. So where am I going with this?

I don't intend on getting into the "follow/don't follow your passion" debate, because on a practical level I think it's easy to feel motivated about almost any brand new project you decide to tackle. But if you're planning on making this your business —on the side or not— it's really important to take a step back and ask yourself if you can see yourself maintaining this project after the newness has worn off. Yes, I'm a huge fan of tiny businesses. But when thinking about the product I wanted to build for them, my enthusiasm just kinda... fell off. I had an MVP in mind, but then beyond that? Nothing much, really.

It's hard to sit and work on a thing when you see it ending up in a kind of maintenance mode shortly after launch. Of course, you can make it work, and if the market research points to it being a potential success, that helps a lot. But making it work is not the same thing as making it work on your own.

Making it work on your own takes a backlog of excitement: being excited about the MVP, and then being easily able to envision future work that you can't wait to start on. And I feel that for this redefined vision for Cheqin.