I want to get into a habit of doing what I call one hour challenges. Whenever I want to start a new project or learn a new technology, I always end up not even trying because of the fear of some eventual failure and not enough progress. The truth is, I’m just overthinking the project, or my goals are set too high . The one hour challenge should help me overcome these feelings and break down goals into attainable pieces.
The one hour challenge is a challenge I made up to see how much I can accomplish in an hour, and to timebox my effort. One of my weaknesses when starting new projects or coming up with new ideas is incorrectly estimating how much time and effort something will take. Sometimes I think a project will take too long, other times I think it will only take 5 minutes. One this that is always certain, is that I’m always wrong. These past experiences have started getting into my head, and now I am always reluctant to try to learn new technologies and put them into practice. Here are the rules of the one hour challenge
- You must work for one hour straight (one 5-min break is allowed)
- Attempt to learn a new technology or implement some new feature in a project
- After the hour, document what you achieved and where you went wrong.
It’s a pretty loosely framed challenge meant to get you started on something that you have been putting off for a while. There isn’t a hard stop on the challenge hour either, you can keep working your project/code until you reach a bigger wall. The idea is that you don’t start working with overwhelming thoughts of eventual failure, but rather thoughts of “I’ll give it one hour and see how far I get”. One hour is a very doable amount of time. It’s enough time to let your brain settle in, and enough time to see if real progress has been made.
I will most likely be using this challenge as a way to document my progress in my Advanced Operating Systems class for the months of September-October. It’s apparently a very intense course requiring close to 40 hours a week of work.
I also plan on using this challenge to write song demos, or to try and replicate technologies/blog posts/projects I see on Hacker news.