There are several personal projects I want to return to. WalkQuest in particular: a game meant to turn walks into adventures and give me a reason to walk more. So far it has demonstrated an unexpected feature: it sits perfectly still, along with its creator.
I could call it a lack of discipline. Discipline has a useful reputation as a word: it can explain anything that did not get done in the evening. But I keep wondering where the energy went during the day.
Where the energy goes
At work, ambitious projects appear: update an internal system, improve an interface, make a complicated process easier to use. At the beginning there is a goal, a group of people and even a feeling that things are about to move. Then it turns out that nobody quite knows who has the key to the door.
Who makes the decision? Who defines the requirements? Whose agreement do we need to take the next step? A question travels from one person to another and sometimes returns almost untouched, except for a new name copied into the email. This is office ping-pong: there is a ball and plenty of players, but the table has to be found anew each time.
Uncertainty at the start of a project is natural. It becomes a problem when it settles in as a permanent way of working. You cannot follow a map when the roads are drawn in after each turn and the person in charge of the compass is on holiday.
What remains after work
Days like that are tiring in a peculiar way. You have been doing things all day: discussing, clarifying, reminding, steering the conversation back to the goal. Yet by evening it is hard to point to a result. It is like spending the day pushing a heavy cupboard, only to discover that someone on the other side was pushing just as determinedly.
It does not only slow a project down. Gradually, it becomes harder to suggest another idea or start on your own. My interest in WalkQuest has not gone away. After work, it simply has to compete with tiredness, dinner and the wish not to be responsible for anything for a while.
I have not found a universal way to get that energy back. Maybe the next step for WalkQuest is an ordinary short walk, without having to write code, devise a plot and prove that I spent the evening admirably all at once.
At work, I would like to begin more often with the basics: who decides, what exactly are we doing and how will we know when it is done? It hardly sounds heroic. Then again, a ping-pong table does not look like a miracle of engineering until you try playing without one.