How to Get Past the Blahs and Finish Your Project

Welcome to Syntax.

Today, I have a case of the blahs. And how do we get past the blahs and finish your project? The the end section of a project where you're just feeling it. That lack of productivity and that lack of burst of energy that you feel at the beginning of a product. And and this isn't everybody, but Certainly is me. My name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver, Colorado. And with me, as always, is West Boss. Hey, everybody.

I was talking to Scott about This because I am finishing my office and I was like, you know, this is no different than a coding project where the last A little bit. The last push is just like, I don't feel like doing this. I want to do other things now. You know, I have other stuff I'm I need to do, but it needs to get done. And it feels like that last 10% takes forever.

So we're going to give some tips Yes. On how to push through that and finish up your project. Actually ship the dang thing so you can move on to something else.

Yeah. I'm I'm very much in need it. Of an episode like this because I've been working on a redesign for a little while now. I'm gonna say a few months now. Yeah. And it was intended to be a few months, but we're a few months in. The site is far, like, is far enough where, like, it feels good to use for the most part, but there's maybe, like, a 2 or 3 things on every single page that need to get worked on or whatever. I mean, there's enough stuff where it's gonna take another couple of months, But it's in that point where it's like, isn't this thing done yet? How about that? Well, this episode is sponsored by 2 amazing companies that could help us along our way. One of which is Linode it. And the other which is LogRocket. Wes, do you want to talk a little bit about Linode? Linode is cloud computing that developers trust.

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Okay. So those last 10 those last 10% of a project, we all know it stinks.

It's no fun. It's hard to get past, and for the most part, the last 10% can feel like it is 90% of the project.

It's definitely something that a lot of people hit, but I don't think everyone experiences this. So if you're out there thing saying like, what are you talking about? The last 10% is where I fly through my work. Well, this episode is for everyone else who is out there who hits that last 10% of the project and just wants to do literally anything else.

Yeah, it's just like, I am ready. Like, you're ready thinking about the next project and what you want to do, but you need to finish the one at hand. And otherwise, you are just a graveyard of abandoned projects.

The energy for me is is really important. When I start a project, I have And lots of energy and that continues through a good chunk of the project. But then it gets time to the little fussy bits. The I spent an hour fixing this little CSS issue and you can't even you can Fixing this little CSS issue and it you can't even you can hardly tell but it's like an edge case bug or something like that.

So it's really important to figure out how do you get past that blah and and finish the project, ship it so you can move on to the next one. Because if you look at Extremely productive people or you look at people who say like, how do they do so much? It's because they are, of course, good at all the parts. But that Last part, I think, is quite honestly the hardest, which is actually finishing it and getting it out the door.

So the tips that we have here Is the first one in this kind of plays off of the productivity episode that we just did. So I'm not going to go too, too much into this one, but It's breaking those things down into smaller tasks. Make a living list of as soon as something pops into your head about The website, the web app that you're building. Oh, that's weird. This this happens when you hover over it 3 times and then right click and and do the cha cha. Okay.

Write that down, right? And that could be a list of bugs that you put a tag on GitHub V1 launch, Or it could just be a to do list of little things that pop up. So they have a system for dumping those into it.

If they are too large, I recommend breaking them into smaller pieces because, like, I have an example right here which is, finish checkout. That would be a good Something that needs to happen inside of an app. But in reality, there's probably 6 or 7 different things inside of that. You need to Send product email, create checkout forms, style the forms, style errors, style success screen, handle any edge cases that might pop up.

And once you sort of have that list of like okay the checkout but these are the subtasks that have to happen in them, Order them in order of importance or motivation.

And like I said earlier, Do one that will give you motivation to sort of like, oh, small win. And then that gives you a little bit of,

momentum in finishing the next ones. Yeah. And here's, here's just some of my to do items that I have. So I have things like, style placeholder CSS, newsletter zone, hero video sizing.

Nav freaks out on page refresh.

Exactly.

And so what I do is is we talked about this in our or our productivity episode What I do is I attach each of them to a feature. I attach a point value in terms of, like, how difficult, how long is this thing going to take me. I give this whether or not it's being blocked.

I, I I define I also define what the priority for something like this is. And and, typically, if it's, like, end of a project, they all kinda get the same priority. Right? If it's you're just finishing up a project, kinda everything's important. There's really nothing that is more important than anything else. But if If you're wondering, like, features should get blocked or anything like that, then, or features should get moved to the next release, then you could Prioritize things a little bit more if you have that kind of flexibility. But right now, I personally don't have the flexibility in all. 58 of my to dos for The launch of our site are all of the same highest priority right now.

Next tip we have here is is just do it. This is a bit of a Silly tip, but honestly, getting started is probably the hardest part. Sometimes I can sit at my desk and just be like, I don't want to do any of the things that I have to do.

Yes. But what works is you literally just force yourself to do one thing.

And then once you start over that initial hump, for me, at least, that's part of one of the hardest parts. And then you can start flying from there on out. Yeah, I

Definitely need to push to get started. It's nice to, like you said, snowball it and start start somewhere where you can do something smaller to get going. Yeah. You know, they always say when you're, like, writing term people papers or something in high school or college, you just, like, open up the file and start writing. And Yeah. That can really just It can really help so much, I think, to just get going, start moving, just try, just, you know, who knows what you're gonna do, but, yeah, just get started.

The next part would be give yourself rewards.

So if you finish 5 of your your tasks, like, every 5 tasks that you finish, you can go out and it. Buy yourself a slushie is what Wes has here in the notes. But for me, I I like to use that. It's like, I'll have, if I if I do 5 more, then I I'll get to go and do this it today or I'll get to play some video games tonight. Otherwise, I'll have to finish these 5 things or something. I mean, there there's a lot of different ways you could reward yourself, But it it's nice to keep the rewards. Also, some like, something that you actually look forward to, but also something that, you have enough self control to not just do the reward anyways.

Yeah. Because there's really nothing stopping you from just doing it. Right? I do it a lot with,

going for a walk, going to grab some lunch, going to get a slushie. I've been a bit of a Slushie connoisseur.

I've been thinking about, for one of my things I need to create like a slushie rating app where Slush puppy is on the very lowest rung and ICEE is at the very highest. You guys have ICEE's in states? Yeah. You do. They have them at Target. You're not much of a slushy guy, are you? I you know, I loved

slushies before

Before you were an adult?

Before I was an adult.

But yeah. I it's funny. I had, like, a a moment at The slushy start at 711, and it it was very funny where where I was getting the the kids' slushies, and there was some, like, little kid.

There's some little kid being, mom, can I get a slushie? And that mom was like, absolutely not. Those things are terrible for you. And I'm sitting here with, like, 2 large ones where I was like, Oh, no. I feel like I'm looking like a bad dad right here. I'm like, blowing up my, kids with sugar here. But, you know, I like slushies myself. I don't know about Icee's. I mean, I see it was always kind of like the iffy ones. You got, like, what, like, 2 flavors? You got, like, blue raspberry and cherry or something? There's There's 2 kinds and they're the best because they're I'm gonna be way more in that. No. What I'm gonna need is, like, tangy mango peach Lemonade

mixed with this and that. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's a whole different world of, like, the 711 has 15 different kinds. Anyways, that's what we do. Go get a slushy. A reward is key.

Next point we have here is be okay with good enough. Good and launched is better than perfect and not launched.

So it just I keep asking yourself, are you a perfectionist? It's funny, like, I've been posting updates on my office on Instagram, and I get a lot of people being like, Oh, that's not like this. I put this built in behind me, and I ripped it out of somewhere else in our house, and I installed it there. And it's not perfectly centered because That's not the one that I ripped out of the house. It's not centered.

And people are like, I could never sleep with it not being centered. Or I would I would do build this thing, and, like, I would, like, take it all apart and rebuild it. I'm like, I'm not gonna do it. It's good enough. It looks Great.

And the reason why you probably don't have anything to show for what you've done It's because you're a perfectionist and Get them.

Get them.

Honestly, though, like, I run into a lot of people who are extremely critical, because they are perfectionists.

And that sucks because They probably have a hard time actually getting stuff out there and launching it and and moving stuff forward, right? So totally For me, it's always like, that's good enough.

Is it gonna bug me in 2 weeks? Like, sometimes I get so hung up on trying to fix a bug in a certain way or style something a certain way and then I need to say like, is this really going to bug me in 2 weeks or is it just because I am So laser focused on this problem right now. So if that's the case, can I ship it right now? Can I launch without it? Probably. Can you fix it after the fact? Probably.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a good a good thing to do. You know what? I I've kind of gone through some of my to dos already for this. It's like, can I put even, like, To add to your can I ship can I fix it after the fact, or can I launch without it? Like, those are 2 questions that you could also rephrase as, like, Is this okay for the next release? Like, is this required for this specific release to get a little bit more software with the with it? But it definitely is it good enough is is a important thing to to understand. You know, I just released, like, a, a fit text plug in, And, it's 400 bytes to do fit text in, like, Svelte. Right? Wow. And it's 0 dependencies, 400 bytes. It's like 50 lines or less of code.

And, like, the first thing I noticed is that every other fit text solution out there has bells and whistles. You know, it's like a kilobyte of JavaScript to do this or that or whatever. And it's like, at the end of the day, I don't need it to do all of those things.

Is it good enough to just do the one task that it can do and do it small? It's good enough. I don't I don't need to spend all this time enhancing it, to do more. It works.

It works fine. Yeah. Beautiful. I love it.

Totally.

Next is keep the end in sight. This is important, because The end result is why you started this thing in the 1st place. So, like, you know, you kinda have your goals. You have your your your The big apple that you're reaching for do people reach for apples? Sure. The big thing that you're reaching for. Right? You're reaching for that apple, and it's right there. You just want that apple real bad. You just gotta have that vision of this thing is almost over. I can do this. I can knock through it, and I can finish this thing up. I I can, I put myself in the place of the excited, fresh, young developer who thought that starting this project was a good idea in the 1st place, and I'm very excited?

Good. My last tip I have here is something that I took from my mom. And it's funny because we always make fun of My mom because she says let's do it quick a minute. And quick a minute is is kind of her saying like she's like, oh, we should like They were over the other day and they're like, yeah, we should we should trim those trees. They're like, okay, maybe in the spring we'll trim them. And she's like, let's just do it now.

Like just quick a minute like and that's her entire mantra is is quick a minute and we actually kind of like it because It makes a lot of sense. Like, sometimes I sit around and be like, yeah, one day I'd like to do this or I'd like to plan some time to do you. This. And when I find myself having you're never gonna plan it. You're never gonna have extra time to do that type of thing. Just do it now. Do it quick a minute.

Stop putting it off. Sometimes you have 20 minutes before a call. You probably have something you can do quick a minute. And if you fit in enough For those little hunks of tiny little tasks, you realize, oh, I actually got quite a bit done. That would have taken me a whole day. Like, even with this office project is I only have an hour after work today to work on something. Should I do it or not? And then at the end of the week, you say, well, I put it in an hour every day. I actually got a lot done. That's a that's a whole Saturday's worth of work. Just doing a quick a minute. Just quick a minute. I've never heard of QuickMinute. I have heard of downtown job.

It those are kinda different those are kinda different philosophies. I think the downtown job is, a much longer process here. You're you're gonna be taking extra time. So quick minute, downtown job.

What if you did a downtown job quick minute? That'd be a pretty neat little,

yeah, you could still do a downtown job. It's just about dicing up the downtown job into Tasks that can be done quick a minute. So if you've only got an hour 20 minutes here or there. A downtown job, by the way, is Scott's dad invented

Just doing a downtown job, doing a great job. And he revealed to me that he didn't invent it. His dad is the one who always said it. It was his dream. Three generations.

Yeah. That's a that's a Ernie Tolinski right there with the downtown job. Ernie,

Have you, have you told Landon about downtown job? Yeah. No. I shouldn't. No. I you know,

Landon said, oh my god. You know, kids, They do kids really do be saying the the darndest things. Landon said to us, at the dinner table, I I felt like this this needs to be shared. He goes, dad, He's like, we were talking about my ribs yesterday because I made ribs for the first time. And he says, dad, These ribs rule. They don't drool, and then and then we started cracking up, and we're like, where'd you hear rules and drools? He's like, Well, if something rules, that means it's good, and if something drools, that means it's bad. And I was like, oh, yeah. That's great. Yeah. Okay.

Kids do say do say the darndest thing. It's funny. My kids I wanted to watch the new Super Pets movie.

And, so I acquired it for them and they they were like, How did You get it. It's only in theaters still, dad, and and then my youngest, my our our middle one comes up to me and goes, he probably hacked a dick.

He stole it.

Oh, I thought that was funny. And then my My other daughter comes to me the next day and goes, so I think I know how you got it. There was sometimes people walking in front of the movie.

Oh, no. So I think that you went into the theater and recorded it for us. Uh-huh.

Yeah. Yeah.

Something like that. Yep.

Metaphorically.

Yeah. Metaphorically. Alright. Anyways, that is our tips on how to get Past the project laws and finish it and get that thing out the door so you can get on to the next one.

Anything else to add there? No. Not necessarily.

Just make that for me.

Make that list and chugging along that list and always have something in front of you to do is is for me.

Oh, actually, you know what? Here's a good little little thing to go out on. We have this thing in Colorado called the incline, which is like an old cog railway that people walk up, And this is a good metaphor for this because, you know, when you walk up this thing, it takes, like for me, it takes, like I'm gonna I don't wanna brag about my times, but my time's, like, 24 minutes.

That's pretty good. It's not great, but it's pretty good. I don't know what Apollo Ohno is doing. He's doing, like, 16 minutes or something, but, it's like a massive task.

You climb, you climb, you climb. You're walking straight up, and it just feels like it's never going to end. And by the 50% of the way through, you see people quitting left and right. And and I could be quitting, at any given point in this thing and be like, okay. That was too much. Or you could just keep going, and then you just you just look and you see, alright.

I have this, like, false summit in front of me that I know is it. A false summit, but I know if I can just get to that false summit, I'll see the real summit after it. So you just keep walking, walking, walking, walking, checking off your things off your to do list. You get to that false summit. You feel a little bit of, alright. I can do this last 10%.

Just take step, step, step. Get to the top. You're there. You can celebrate it. And jog down to the bottom or whatever. Either way, it's no different when you're working in this stuff. By the time you get to the fall somewhere, the halfway up point, or, you know, the the 10% left point, it stinks, and all you can do is just keep going, keep checking those things off, and then you can get to the top and celebrate.

Beautiful. I love it.

I will have to try that one day when I come to, come to Colorado. Oh, yeah. We have these us stairs in Hamilton here. And the stairs is basically in Hamilton, you live up the mountain or down the mountain. And It's not really a mountain, it's just an escarpment. And but we have stairs all along the mountain to go up the mountain or down like a pedestrian stairs and People go up and down them for exercising.

And my wife had been doing them for 6 months.

And I was just I talk so much smack all the time. I'm like, I guarantee I could I could beat your time beat your time. She's like, there's No way you can just like like I'm the guy who says he can run a marathon without doing any training. So I do it. I was like, all right, I did it. So one day she drove me to the bottom and I hauled ass up these things and I was like wheezing like I could hardly get my breath in because I just was doing 2 steps at a time, and I beat her time. I beat her time and but, like, man, that was that was tough.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. This thing is no joke with when we come out here, you know, when you get out here, if you ever do, we'll, we'll definitely hit up the incline. Oh, yeah. We'll we'll take a long time. 1st

try.

Yeah. Alright. Awesome. Well, thanks everybody for tuning in, and we will catch you on Wednesday. Peace. Peace.

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