What I am about to write about is not a new and revolutionary idea. It’s something I’ve read about countless times before. It’s also something I have fairly consistently ignored over the past couple of decades!

That is: The idea of just starting doing something! Like now! RIGHT NOW!

If you are anything like me, the voice in your head which blocks you most of the time is the one which tells you that a job worth doing is worth doing well. You should be aiming for high quality and going for perfection. Except, that is a very high standard to set yourself.. Especially when embarking on a new project.

The reality is that I often have an idea and start planning it out in my head. I may fire up the computer and code something. Time ebbs away. Then I’m not happy so it gets tweaked. I have some more ideas about how it could be even better and get distracted. More time passes. Eventually, real world responsibilities catch up with me and I run out of free time. The result is whatever I was working on gets either abandoned or mothballed for a long time.

Here’s another approach: Do something quick! Fix it up later!

That’s right, I’m implying you should throw something out there. It won’t be perfect. There will a hundred things wrong with it. You can fix it up along the way but you’ve started.

I’ve been meaning to start this blog for roughly five years now. Yeah, you heard that right.. FIVE YEARS! So just after last Christmas I set myself a goal that I would have something up and running and at least one blog post published by the end of January 2017. (This is post two so I’m exceeding my own expectations here!)

If I’m honest about the process. I did procrastinate horrifically at times and the scope crept up significantly. The following blocked me:

  • Learning how to use Jekyll and GitHub Pages
  • Installing Ruby and Ruby Gems
  • Looking up how to get Jekyll working well on Windows
  • Not liking the default Jekyll theme and failing miserably at getting other themes working
  • Persevering, changing tact and finding a theme I actually, partially, liked
  • Tweaking the theme until I liked it enough
  • Getting it all building locally and committing to Github
  • WRITING AND PUBLISHING A BLOG POST!

So I must be happy now. Yes, it’s working.. I’ve got something done and you are reading this (hopefully reading down this far too!) It’s far from finished though and there is a ton of stuff I still want to improve, such as:

  • I need to tag my posts and articles with categories
  • I want to have a search feature
  • Not happy with my writing style yet and my grammer sucks
  • I need more graphics in the blog posts to separate the text
  • AND SO ON!

But.. I can still iterate on what I have already achieved and make it better. Absolutely nothing is set in stone.

The point I hope I’m making is that achieving something small can often be motivation in itself to keep building on what you have already started. No more blank canvas. The wheels are already turning!