Failure

Well, I committed to making a commitment platform last week, and it is not here. I failed!

However, I don't feel too bad about it. It is a shame that I failed, but I think it would be much worse if I hadn't done it and also hadn't committed to it. In that sense I see commitment as having a double benefit: it helps your goals feel real, and also prevents optimising the goalposts away from what you wanted in the first place. I want to build this thing, and I'm closer to it having failed than not having tried.

But if I want to succeed, I need to go meta and learn from what went wrong this time. In this case, I didn't leave enough time for it early in the week, thinking I could make it up on the weekend. But actually my weekend got busy and I ended up trying to cram it all in in one day. Of course, that day didn't have enough time to actually finish anything. And, worst of all, that outcome wasn't entirely surprising.

To make it surprising again, I'm going to put more effort into estimating the amount of time left to finish everything and compare it to the amount of time left in the week. In a sense, this is the burn-down type information I was thinking of with the scoping calendar. I normally don't do much time estimation for personal projects, but since I'm setting a time-based commitment, a time prediction makes a lot of sense.

So, with that extra level of failure insurance I will commit again: a commitment platform by next Monday's post!