The cost of "I'll do it later"

I had been ”planning” a side project for months. One weekend I sat down, scoped it to what I could finish by Sunday night, and shipped a working version. The plan I had been writing for months was about ten percent of what I actually built when I just started.

I have a folder of ”later” projects from three years ago that I genuinely still have not touched. The ones I started inside a weekend taught me far more, even when they failed, because doing the thing once is worth more than thinking about it ten times.

Houston could not finish the product fast enough to pitch it, so he recorded a three-minute demo, posted it on Hacker News, and watched the waiting list jump from five thousand to seventy-five thousand overnight. The video was the experiment -- and it proved demand before he wrote production code.

Every ”later” I keep on the list takes up some background tab in my head, slowing everything else down. The habit I am building is to either start it this week, schedule a real day for it, or honestly delete it from the list. Anything else is just background noise.

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