(2014-09-25) Kazemi Newport Small Projects

May'2014: Darius Kazemi has shifted to keeping his Side Project-s small. It does not matter how or frivolous a project seems: everything you do adds to your body of work. I can’t stress this enough: you are not just creating a bunch of small things. You are creating an EcoSystem of projects... If you make lots of small projects, you can approach the same idea from many, many different angles. This can be really interesting... Making lots of small projects means you stay constantly excited. You literally cannot be bored with work if you stop working on it the moment become bored... Having lots of projects means you can watch your aesthetic develop over time very quickly... You make stuff, and you’re going to like certain things, but you can’t predict what other people will like. So even if you make something and you think it sucks, put it out there. Maybe people will hate it, maybe they’ll ignore it, or maybe they’ll like it. But just put it out there... Out of my 72 projects last year, I’d say 10 of them were successful in some substantial way. That’s 1 out of 7 projects. At that rate, if I made one project a year, it would take me SEVEN YEARS to make something that caught on with the public. By focusing on small projects, I can experience 10 major successes a year. (Quantity Beats Quality)

Sept24: Cal Newport is experimenting with a similar idea: What I’ve noticed in my thinking about this problem over the past week or two is that at the beginning of each Deep Work session, I’ll typically come up with a novel approach to attempt. As I persist in the session, however, the rate of novelty decreases. After thirty minutes or so of work I tend to devolve into a cycle where I’m rehashing the same old ideas again and again. I’m starting to wonder, therefore, if this specific type of deep work, where you’re trying to find a creative insight needed to unlock a problem, is best served by multiple small dashes of deep work as oppose to a small number of longer sessions. That is, given five free hours during a given week, it might be better to do ten 30-minute dashes as oppose to one 5 hour slog.