The idea triangle

I've been thinking a bit about the different ways I work on ideas, and particularly the prototypes I've been spending a lot of my time on recently. I've been trying to figure out why it's so tricky to keep them under control; they always seem to want to turn into huge projects, or be so small and inconsequential that I lose interest. In fact, I'm beginning to think that this is one of those triangle constraint type situations, where I can only get favourable results on two sides by sacrificing the third. The sides, in this case, are how interesting it is, how complete it is, and how long it takes.

How long an idea takes is probably the easiest one to reason about, and it's the one I've been paying the most attention to. The time isn't just important because I could be spending it on other things, it also has a qualitative impact on how much and when I can do that kind of work. Something like this writing is a low enough impact that I feel comfortable committing to it even when it's not my main focus; I can fit it in around other things. So it'd be nice to get the time for these down to that point. Unfortunately, that means sacrifices in the other two areas.

How interesting the idea is has a lot to do with what it can do for you rather than how useful it is. You get a lot of value from exploring the more out-there ideas, usually because you're learning and discovering new things. That's usually opposed to being practical, because the most practical ideas tend to be incremental refinements of existing ones. That has a very positive impact on time, because you can really optimise your environment for that particular kind of idea. If I was making nothing but mobile games, I could spend a little bit of time improving my toolchain and get a big boost out of it. More interesting ideas take longer because you don't know what you're doing when you start them.

The dimension of completeness is the other side of that. You could just do the bare minimum necessary to learn something or do something with an idea, but in many cases you want to flesh it out. The extreme of this is the product mindset, where the idea is important, sure, but it's the polish on the idea and how well the idea is developed that count much more than the idea itself. It's the difference between a Wright Brothers plane and a 747, or the original internet vs AOL. Of course, completeness takes a lot of time, and even more so with an idea that is more interesting. If the idea has a lot of unexplored and interesting facets, each one of them is another thing that has to be explored and refined if you're trying to make a nicely packaged product out of it.

From this triangular perspective, it's fairly easy to see why the prototypes have been difficult. I'm often trying to take an interesting idea and make something relatively product-ish out of it, and then being surprised that it takes way longer than I expected. Although I've managed to scale down the time taken, that often seems to come at a cost of interestingness; I shoot for less ambitious ideas so that I can still make something out of them in time. But my new conclusion is that I need to leave the interestingness where it is, and start cutting down on completeness.