Day 118: Predicting the future

personal

Woah, today flew by. I spent some time reworking the in-app messages so that showing what’s new after an update won’t be so disruptive (I think people would get annoyed by it after a while):

  • Before:

  • After:

I made a changelog for Intention modeled after Notion’s changelog, and it made me reflect on my journey getting Intention to where it is today.

I noticed that there were huge chunks of time where in retrospect, I was spending time on things that did’t make sense.

Status bar

For example, I spent a ton (and I mean A TON) of time painfully writing DOM manipulation code so that I could put the status bar for Intention on top of the page and avoid blocking the page content by moving all the other content down (even after considering a million edge cases, there were always a few sites that wouldn’t work well despite my best efforts):

In retrospect, putting the timer in the icon badge like I do now would’ve been a much better way to move forward. I guess at the time I thought it was critical to have the intention prominently displayed on the page, but a hovering modal would’ve saved me a lot of agony.

Hide Feed

There was a three-month gap between November and February where I switched my focus to Hide Feed and worked on that. While I’m proud of the robust site-modifying architecture that I created, I spent a bunch of time building things that no one wanted, like the ability to replace feeds with custom photos. Hiding the feed using simple CSS selectors would solved the problem sufficiently to call it a day, but I spent 80% of my time on the 20% tasks of replacing feeds with beautiful pictures, having it work with a single click, and making sure it was incredibly robust.

But! In the process of developing Hide Feed, I came up a bunch of patterns and modules that made developing Intention much, much easier once I started working on Intention again, so it wasn’t really a waste. Right now, it’s quite obvious that Intention is a much more compelling product than Hide Feed, but that wasn’t clear at the time (to the point where I almost killed Intention in favor of working on Hide Feed).

Group streaks

I spent several weeks building the group streaks feature, which I’m now planning on scrapping. I actually don’t feel too bad about spending time on this because it helped me get my feet wet with Firebase and I don’t think I could’ve known whether this feature was worthwhile without trying it out first.

This is all to say that I clearly get stuck in ruts where I focus on things that in retrospect end up not being incredibly useful to have spent time on. On one hand, I think this is totally fine and an inevitable part of the process. It would be miraculous if I was spending my time on the 100% most impactful thing all the time. I’m going to get it “wrong” and that’s part of the journey. These detours also help me develop skills and try things that end up directly and indirectly helping me. I’m also having fun! On the other hand, it does make me realize that it’s incredibly difficult to know what to focus on. For example, I have an idea for a new social/cooperative feature in Intention that I think could be awesome. But will I look back on this in a few months and think that it was poorly thought out? Is there any way to know?