How to Stay in a Project Nobody Asked You to Start#
I’ve discovered an interesting problem with giving yourself an ambitious project.
There’s nobody to blame when it becomes tedious.
Nobody assigned it to me.
Nobody imposed the deadline.
Nobody made me decide that building an AI recruitment system from scratch would be an excellent learning experience.
I did this to myself.
😂
When I started building Recruiter Bot, I knew I wanted to learn how to design and connect AI systems.
I also knew how I learn best.
Give me an interesting technical problem, and I can happily spend eight hours investigating it.
But when the novelty wears off, and the work becomes repetitive?
My attention starts looking for somewhere else to be.
Unfortunately, an ambitious project involves both.
One stage required me to go through years of my career history, documenting projects, responsibilities, and outcomes so Recruiter Bot would have reliable information to work with.
Necessary? Absolutely.
Interesting?
For about the first day.
I call that particular chapter:
Career Archaeology: The Week I Became Bored of Myself.
By day two, I was ready to throw my computer across the room.
Not because anything was broken.
I was just profoundly tired of discussing myself.
And I still had days of it ahead of me.
😂
But skipping the task would leave a gap in the system.
So I developed a little trick.
When I notice my attention drifting during a working session, I ask ChatGPT to show me three things:
Where we started.
Where we are now.
Where we’re going.
Not just a list of completed tasks.
I want to see what we’ve built, what I’ve learned, and how today’s work contributes to the bigger system.
And it’s surprisingly effective.
Because when you’re buried in the tedious details, it’s easy to forget what you’re actually building.
You stop feeling like you’re developing an AI system.
You start feeling like you’re entering the seventeenth variation of the same career example.
And questioning every decision that brought you here.
Including your decision to have a career.
😂
Seeing the bigger picture doesn’t magically make the boring work exciting.
But it reminds me why I chose to do it.
And having ChatGPT there to help reconstruct that progress makes a project I’m building independently feel a little less solitary.
I’ve essentially built a small system inside my bigger system.
Not to automate away the learning.
To help me stay engaged long enough to do the learning.
Sometimes I don’t need another productivity tool, a deadline, or a motivational quote.
I just need to remember that the boring thing I’m doing today is part of something I genuinely want to build.
Although if anyone ever suggests I spend another entire week discussing my career history, I may need a significantly more sophisticated motivation system.
Or a new computer.
😂