Getting past anxiety and self doubt
Getting past anxiety and self doubt
A while ago I posted a website idea here and asked for some feedback. (Here’s the post: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/what-are-your-goals-in-life-4c6fe8bc46)
The idea was to build a simple website where we can share our life goals and see what’s inspiring each other. Some great feedback was left on that post, so thank you to everyone who took the time to reply! It really means a lot.
However that was 9 months ago now, and I’m embarrassed to say I don’t have anything to show. I’ve found it hard to stay motivated and focused, despite the fact that I really want to work on this idea.
Perfectionism and self doubt have stopped me from making a lot of progress.
I’m now trying to overcome these fears by just launching something. Instead of waiting until the MVP is ready, I’ve published a basic page that explains what I’m trying to do at https://thesedays.life. It only took 2 hours and it was live.
My plan now is to work in small 1-2 week sprints and publish after each one. And I’ll be sending a monthly email to some of my friends telling them what I’ve done to create some external accountability. It seems like this works well as long as there’s engagement, so I’ll be asking for a bit of feedback too. Anyone can join the list for this email from the website to stop me from getting too comfortable :p
This is a bit of an experiment, but I’m hoping to learn a lot and feed that back into accountability features on the site that everyone can make use of.
Has anyone here dealt with similar battles with confidence, anxiety or self doubt? Did you manage to overcome them?
I am taking on something gigantic, so those feelings are always hovering around, waiting to pounce. The way I've kept forward momentum is just to lay the tracks and fire up the train. Laying the tracks = setting up and curating, on a daily basis, tasks to do. I have created 500+ stories (tasks) in bite-sized chunks in https://clubhouse.io. Each night, I put a few in "ready for development". If I spike 10 things in there, I get overwhelmed. When I have time to work on the project, I tackle a few things and move them to "in development", then "complete". When I have random thoughts, I add them to a story and forget about them until the next curation session. It's let me not worry about all the doubts, and keep moving.
You're right there, you've built loads of features into Magnus Rush! I like the approach you're taking to plan out your work. I'm experimenting with using Jira at the minute to do something similar; I'm grouping tasks into sprints and not letting myself jump task until the current sprint is complete. How do you choose which tasks you put into "ready for development"?
clubhouse is super easy to use, so I can simply drag things over into the "ready for development" section. At any time, I have 2 or 3 epics going, usually SaaS, Mobile, Marketing epics. So I can switch gears when I need to. I try to keep my unscheduled bucket roughly sorted, and review sometimes so I only need to scan the top of the list. I pick a combination of things which are easy wins, and 1 or 2 nasty things. This usually amounts to 4-5 things, and a day's worth of work in my sparetime hours.
It's really hard to get anything going. Starting a new business/idea is like building a new habit. Building new habits is hard. It's once you do things consistently that it then becomes a bit easier to get into the flow of things.
I'm in the process of trying to get a website started too, but despite having a track record with already running a business, I've been finding it really hard to get it going too. I've stopped/started over the past 3 years, lol.
I've signed up to your list :)
That's great to know, and you've put it very succinctly there. I think some sort of habit building framework was what I was missing last time around.
So it's not just me! Just curious; what would enable you to get your new website started?
Thanks for signing up, much appreciated! Your profile picture is great by the way 😂
For me it's partially building up 'that habit' again, it feels hard to find the mental space when starting a new thing.
But it's also about clearing out some current commitments so that I'm not stretching myself too thin.