When You Care Too Much to Do It Right
I’ve been staring at my process notebook for twenty minutes, trying to figure out how to explain why the projects I actually care about are always the messiest ones. You know the feeling. The client work gets done clean and on time, with proper documentation and stakeholder check-ins. But that side project you’ve been thinking about for months? The one that keeps you up at night with possibilities? It’s a disaster.
Right now I’m juggling three things that matter to me: a community garden planning tool that started as a weekend experiment, a podcast series about people who quit corporate jobs to become beekeepers (don’t ask), and something I’m calling “the permission project” that doesn’t have a clear definition yet. None of them have proper timelines. Two of them don’t even have names that make sense to other humans.
The garden tool thing started when I watched my neighbor planning raised beds with a napkin and what looked like crayons from her kid’s backpack. There had to be a better way. Six weeks later, I’ve built something that can calculate soil volumes and suggest companion plants, but I still can’t figure out how to save user preferences without the whole thing crashing. The beekeeping podcast exists as fourteen voice memos in my phone and a Google Doc titled “bee people are weird (affectionate).”
The Permission Project Doesn’t Know What It Wants to Be
This is where things get interesting, or frustrating, depending on how you feel about ambiguity. The permission project started when I noticed how often people say “I’d love to try that, but…” and then list reasons that aren’t actually reasons. They’re just things they think they need permission for.
So I started collecting these moments. The woman at the coffee shop who mentioned she’d always wanted to learn pottery but felt too old at thirty-seven. The guy in my building who designs intricate paper airplanes during Zoom calls but thinks it’s “not productive enough” to pursue seriously. My friend who writes poetry during lunch breaks but won’t call herself a poet because she doesn’t have an MFA.
The project changes every time I touch it. Some days it feels like it should be a workshop series. Other days it wants to be a zine, or maybe a collection of tiny interventions, like permission slips for adults. Yesterday I spent two hours designing business cards that just say “You’re allowed to try” on one side and blank space on the other. I have no idea what people would do with them, which is probably the point.
Documentation Is for Projects You Don’t Love
Here’s what I’ve noticed about caring too much: proper project management goes out the window. When something matters, you work on it in stolen moments, in the margins of other responsibilities, with whatever tools are handy. My bee podcast research lives in three different apps, two physical notebooks, and about forty-seven browser bookmarks with names like “honey extraction lady Minnesota maybe???”
The garden planning tool has better documentation, mostly because I keep breaking it and need to remember what I was trying to do. But even that’s scattered. Code comments written at 11 PM are remarkably unhelpful when you’re debugging at 7 AM. “This function does the magic thing with the dirt math” is not as informative as past-me seemed to think.
I’ve started keeping what I call collision notes. Moments when two unrelated parts of different projects suddenly make sense together. Like realizing that the companion planting algorithm might work for matching people with complementary skills, or that the permission project could help gardening newbies feel less intimidated by soil pH charts.
The Mess Is the Message
Traditional project management assumes you know where you’re going. Requirements gathering, milestone planning, success metrics. All useful for getting from point A to point B efficiently. But the projects that matter most often start at point A with no idea that point B exists yet.
The beekeeping podcast happened because I met a former investment banker at a farmer’s market who was selling honey with handwritten labels covered in tiny illustrations of bees wearing business suits. She spent twenty minutes explaining propolis to me with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for lottery winners. I bought three jars and walked away thinking about career transitions and the stories people tell about choosing different lives.
Now I’m trying to figure out how to capture that energy in audio form without making it sound like a LinkedIn post about following your passion. It’s harder than you’d think. Most people don’t talk about quitting their job to become a beekeeper the way you’d explain a strategic pivot. They talk about it like falling in love, or finding a missing piece of themselves they didn’t know was gone.
What Happens Next (Spoiler: I Don’t Know)
This is where I usually end up with the projects I care about. Somewhere between proof of concept and actual thing, with a pile of good intentions and partial solutions. The garden tool works but needs design help. The bee podcast has compelling subjects but terrible audio quality. The permission project exists mostly as enthusiasm and sticky notes.
Maybe that’s okay. Maybe the point isn’t to finish everything perfectly, but to keep following the interesting questions wherever they lead. To document the process even when it’s messy, especially when it’s messy, because that’s where the real work happens.
I’m curious about your unfinished projects, the ones that keep nudging at you when you’re supposed to be focusing on other things. What are you working on in the margins? What would you try if you gave yourself permission to start before you’re ready?