Effort and Progress Are Not The Same Thing

Background

When I started this project about a year and half ago, I did so with the intent of building the least amount features necessary to get the project off the ground. This is a philosophy that I've learned and adopted through the years and across various domains in my life. It sort of sounds like an "MVP," or minimum viable product, approach. And in many ways I suppose it is. But keeping scope restrained is something that didn't come naturally to me. Rather, this approach is a testament to lessons learned from many, many hours of effort wasted on things that will never see the light of day.

What follows is a reflection on time wasted and hopefully enough personal growth to reduce the amount of time I waste in the future. I'll tell the story using this project as example and metaphor.

Why We Waste Time

Rather, why do we waste time on sub-optimized effort? This isn't a treatise on effort. I'm taking for granted that effort is present, just not allocated wisely. Furthermore, I'm not a psychologist, so this is speculative more than authoritative. My fiancé is a psychologist, so conversations on topics like these happen often at home. But I'm not, so take my inference with a grain of salt.

Continuing with my example of this project, my blog let's call it, I began by constructing few features. All that really existed visually for the visitor were text-only articles and simple means of indexing content like tags and topics. The home page would preview a few recent articles and direct the user to tags and topics they may be interested in. Simple and minimalist, though not much of a product or really much for the user to engage with.

But, I wasn't always so uninteresting. With earlier projects, I had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours building features and tools before anyone other than myself had seen them. Sometimes, a codebase would accumulate high tens-of-thousands of lines of code before seeing the outside world. What do these projects have in common with my unembellished blog? Zero visitors at first

I'm learning now, perhaps as I've grown older and become more guarded of my time, that I have a habit of diving in too deep into a project before receiving feedback, before some indication that my efforts are being received well by the world around me. But why?

First, there's disorganization. Not in the negative sense of the word, but rather enthusiasm. It's easy to allow ambition or excitement to hijack planning and fail to set any real boundaries on the scope of the project.

I fall victim to this often. I'll hold in my mind an idealistic form of what I desire my project to be rather than target a more austere starting point. And fair enough; I don't see anything wrong in aiming high in principle. But, who says you can't continue expanding scope after first release?

Starting with an MVP will allow for a different form of excitement when what you built begins to gain traction. At some point in time, the enthusiasm you began with, where nothing seemed impossible, will fatigue and something will need to fill the void. That's where positive market feedback enters. It's a pretty cool experience to have something you've imagined in your head be received well by the market. For me, this validation provides a renewed energy to continue forwards after enduring the early knocks of ground-zero entrepreneurship.

Another reason we, at least I, invest excessively in the early stage of unproved ideas is that it allows us to avoid confronting painful realities. Negative feedback can be tough to bear. When I start a company or build a project, I internalize quite a bit; the identity of the entrepreneur and product tend to merge. Negative feedback can feel intensely personal and attacking. It's easy to fall in the trap of avoiding criticism through isolation to avoid these sorts of negative experiences.

But avoiding negative feedback is to reject one of the most powerful opportunities to improve and refine our efforts. We should accept gracefully those opportunities for feedback. This is where the MVP comes in to play. Given the importance of feedback, it should then be preferred to arrive quickly to the earlier point where others can get ahold of whatever you're working on and tell you what they think about it.

The beautiful thing about the feedback opportunity is you may learn that the simple thing you started with might just be enough. This leads into my next thought.

Beauty In Austerity

Does a heavily featured product or service hold an advantage to the simpler option? I'm not so sure. When I encounter really large, expansive products or services, I often feel a sense of dissonance. Furthermore as a related concept, studies show that too many choices decrease decision quality. Then perhaps too many features similarly overwhelm the user and decrease experience quality. Maybe a simple thing done well is better than an expansive thing of lesser quality execution? (Do Simple This Well)

Returning to the metaphor of my blog project, I decided not to begin by using cover images for blog articles, although the temptation was there. I encountered numerous articles suggesting that images improve experience, but I was skeptical.

First, there's the complexity and cost of managing static assets like images. Images have a certain cost to store in memory and then later retrieved when a page containing images is rendered. Additionally, I would need to build backend to handle the management of images. (Here's an article I wrote about how to do this in Django: How Do You Embed Images in a Django Blog From a WYSIWYG Editor?). Given the effort, I determined that images weren't imperative.

I do think that visual material can be beneficial to the user. I think good images can and do communicate information to users quickly and provide a pleasing aesthetic for the user. But I don't think the benefit is inevitable. Just because something can be useful, additive, etc., doesn't mean the same can't be detractive if executed poorly. 

I visit Yahoo on occasion for news. Whenever I scroll through content at yahoo.com I'm often impressed by how generic the article cover images appear. Even from large publications, the images often appear to be stock photos. I'm left wondering, what value does this add. Rather than have customized, or purpose built images for a particular image, you can find the same image reused across multiple articles. When a topic is trending, multiple authors will pull the same image.

When I see this, I'm struck by the inauthenticity of an obviously generic image. I find it distracting. In situations like these, why not omit the image altogether? That said, with generative AI technologies like Open AI's DALL-E, it will become increasingly possible to create meaningful and unique images that are informative, relevant and visually pleasing.

Final Thoughts

Although it's comfortable to work siloed off from the world, get to that earliest point where you can receive feedback. Not for any competitive reason (that's a separate discussion), but if only for the sake that it may save you from going down a road leading nowhere. Your time is mutually exclusive and finite, save it for those tasks yielding the greatest reward (regardless of how you measure the reward). And last, the simpler thing may be better than the complicated thing to begin with. Get feedback early and often and create the smallest thing necessary to fulfill the objective.