Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2008 13:05:03 -0700
Reply-To: neil N <musomuso@GMAIL.COM>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: neil N <musomuso@GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: Need inspiration. Lacking motivation on my engine conversion
(Warning! Severe Whining Within! --- ;^)
In-Reply-To: <ac1f198b0804050943k365550bdjc096aa84a19419b6@mail.gmail.com>
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> Uh, hope this helps?
>
> Jim Akiba
>
Yes it totally does.
Interesting to get another POV from someone who does this for a living
that's for sure. And much appreciated considering how little time you
must have.
As I wrote before, I had the sense to try and see this as a "journey"
rather than something that HAD to be done by a certain date. But OTOH,
I knew that I needed a date as part of the goal or it could have
dragged on, so I put a due date on it. This was a mistake. As was
having a "need" coupled with that date. I have to dismiss April
camping for now. If it happens, even for a day, that will be a bonus.
The real goal and thrills will be hearing it run, then driving it for
the first time!
I agree with most of what has been kindly offered to me in words. And
to reiterate for any other conversion newb that sees this......
I would suggest that one would be better off having maybe a season in
mind as a due date. Starting in Winter? Maybe sometime in Summer is a
good general timeline. Or, if you mentally ballpark 3 months, double
it. And, don't have too much, or for that matter, anything, "riding"
on your project. IMHO, the best mental goal is hearing it run for the
first time, and taking it for that first drive.
In terms of my project, it's one thing to pull parts off an engine,
clean, prep, replace if needed, redo seals, install pre made parts
etc. I can do that. It's totally another to fabricate a part, and/or
design and fabricate. Other newbs be forewarned. --- :^)
Your experienced words are helping Jim.
Thanks.
Neil.
On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 9:43 AM, Jim Akiba <jakiba@bostig.com> wrote:
> Another thing that would help is dumping what's in your head onto
> paper or into the computer. Dump into a timeline and try to hit for
> each item and sub-item the what, why, and how of each. It doesn't
> matter if the timeline is totally junk to start with it will be
> adjusted as you go based on actual performance and real world
> results... not speculation. In order to get the timing correct from
> the get-go, you would have already needed to have done it before.. so
> clearly that won't happen.. but the approach is just as good at
> helping you complete things. The timeline and paper dump will serve as
> your human page-file.. so you can unload all the stuff that shouldn't
> be in your juice RAM on top of your neck. That should be occupied with
> current tasks and immediate problem solving... and like Mike mentioned
> going away for it, or even sleeping and rebooting the old juice
> computer can help. If you don't do this, you'll tend to have too much
> in your juice RAM, and get overwhelmed... ever try to run like WAY too
> many proggies on a machine all at once? What happens... yup
> performance goes into the toilet, and it can't do ANY of the tasks
> well anymore.
>
> I disagree with Scott about not having deadlines. Except they really
> shouldn't be called deadlines, but livelines. You need a target to
> hit, it helps structure your approach. If it's simple enough that you
> can at once visualize the entire chain of events/processes then it's
> fairly simple and this isn't needed. And of course the more you would
> do this, the more realistic that would become... But in something like
> this, at this level of question marks floating around.. I think it
> might help you to break down what you know needs to happen into chunks
> and then track their progress. It's hard enough to operate on too
> many known tacks all at once.. but trying to learn new things while
> all that's going on? You're begging for frustration and overload.
>
> For instance, March is out the window.. April unlikely perhaps.. but
> WHY is that the case. Are you not giving it enough time? Are you
> having to learn too many things? Does sourcing supplies take too long?
> I think your action and reaction will be better placed if you can
> figure out WHAT the nastiest points of contention are, and not only
> HOW you will spread your time in order to complete it, but WHY it
> would be best to spend your time here vs. there to maintain your
> motivation and sanity as a consideration among the obvious others you
> already have in mind. Speaking of which, you should jot down your
> original goals too.. as it will help limit "feature creep" which is
> the deadliest form of amorphous unstructured project control("well I'm
> doing all this work here already, I might as well______ while I'm at
> it"), and I bet the cause of automotive projects failing 90% of the
> time. I've seen so many go down in flames like that... or rather not
> go down in flames, but just peter out and dwindle to burnt ends with
> one final whisp of smoke and stay dead.
>
> Ok so you have a "finished exhaust" somewhere in the equation down
> the road... so where is it? Throw it out there into a liveline... say
> April 25th. Now what would you have to do before then to get there by
> April 25th? Start putting it all down.. as soon as you realize a
> milestone isn't going to work... and now you should have a better
> handle on *why* it won't work.. you move the liveline to suit, and
> will adjust your course of action as well. I think having a target
> will always be better than not... it gives you some intrinsic
> motivation to try and hit it... even if it's moving. Which is more
> fun, shooting clay pigeons? Or just shooting?
>
> For instance. In order to deliver on the new kits and make the trip
> west, I have scoped out a bunch of milestones. A supplier totally
> hosed us on Thursday.. so I had to move the deadline/liveline and
> cancel the trip/vacation to SDM in order to maintain the delivery
> schedule.. as ALL of my padding(which is another nice thing since you
> can build in the usual twice as expensive 3x as long padding into
> things) was used up. Sucks, but I found out as early as I could and
> made an adjustment because this is in place. I didn't find out at the
> last minute, which is the worst thing for both stress and motivation.
>
> The other crappy feeling is KNOWING you're going to miss you're
> original deadline and having that failure loom over you up until the
> day it passes... why would you do that to yourself! This is likely
> the reason that Scott doesn't like deadlines.. but I argue it isn't
> the deadline that causes this, it's the fixing of the deadline...
> unless you are really familiar with the entire chain of events, they
> will be livelines... only when you master it(which usually means
> having done it all enough times) can you even begin to think of them
> as deadlines and then follow through and be right. So perhaps I
> actually agree with Scott afterall ha. But there are still targets,
> which is important. Some people would do well to take the very same
> level of care in oh.. I dunno.. planning wars? But I digress.
>
> As far as where you are now, you know right now the goals in all
> this(the what). You certainly know the reasons you want to(the why).
> The only question then is how. The difficultly will be making sure you
> have your brain at the correct level of "magnification" for each point
> in the project. Dump the high level ones onto paper. The highest level
> being the conversion itself and it's what, why, how. If you zoom in
> closer.. the sub-item of "exhaust" is right there and needs to have
> the what, why, how.. zoom in further and the exhaust starts to break
> down into components.. and on and so forth.. at some level you won't
> need to zoom in any further and those items will start to fall/be
> completed easily... and surely enough even the most complex set of
> tasks imaginable or even unimaginable can actually be completed.
>
> If any of this sounds really familiar to anyone please let me know..
> since AFAIK I've stumbled into this philosophy out of my own
> necessity, and if someone else already figured it out I'd like to skip
> ahead a few chapters rather than come up with the rest of it on my own
> ha.. although the approach does seem to work for me. There is a great
> piece of software called "Inspiration" that is targeted for school
> kids, that builds graphical trees, webs, etc and can flip flop back
> and forth between outlines and graphical representations.. and it
> quite fast at capturing the skeleton of a project as it dumps out of
> my head. Often my mind tends to vomit ideas or link chains of insight
> suddenly and involuntarily which is I guess what some others call
> inspiration... definitely sounds better than naming the software
> "Mental Barf bag, puke it now, sort and adjust later" or "Brain dump,
> keep yourself regular and don't hold it all in"
>
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