Hours Remaining: 0

So the 100 hours is up and here’s what I managed to achieve in that time:

Clearly, the game is unfinished (I would like the cartoon exuberance of the title screen to be reflected throughout the game) but I could still release it today and it certainly wouldn’t be the worst thing the App Store has ever seen. However, I would only be doing it to meet this arbitrary deadline I set myself. I can and should make this better.

So even though it won’t be released within the 100 hours, it could. I count that as a success.

But even if it wasn’t ready for the App Store, I would still count it as a success because I have thoroughly enjoyed working on it and I know in my bones that it is something that I am going to see through to the end, however long it takes.

Which is the much more important thing.

Deadlines and Goals

Personal deadlines and goals can often be a good motivational tool to get us started, but they can easily turn in to weapon against our own self esteem. We often underestimate how long things take and overestimate our own abilities, willpower, and motivation to get those things done.

This can lead to these deadlines being missed and the goals unmet, which turn the good work we have done into failure and disappointment. Instead of seeing what we’ve achieved, we only see what we haven’t.

For personal projects, deadlines and goals should be MacGuffins—Randy Pausch head fakes—designed to get the plot of our lives moving towards something bigger without having to pay attention to that bigger (and often paralysing) thing.

The deadlines themselves should serve as moments of reflection, in which we re-evaluate the work we’re doing. Is it everything we thought it would be (the daily grind of a creative life, for example, often doesn’t quite match the romantic expectations of it)? Are we still enjoying the process? What was the larger goal and is that still something we want?

Sometimes, in doing the work, an unexpected aspect of that work might grab our interest and make us re-evaluate what it is we actually want. In that case, do we really want to carry on working to these goals and deadlines that were set before we knew this stimulating new interest we’ve discovered even existed?

The enjoyment of meeting a goal or a deadline or completing a project is fleeting and momentary and hollow. It will never make up for all those spent hours if we hated each one of those hours (of course, we won’t love all of them—ask me about provisioning profiles and certificate signing—but on balance there should be many more good hours than bad).

Finally, we should never feel beholden to our past selves. As soon as we start doing the work they set for us, we gain knowledge about ourselves that they never had.