Scope creep can kill any project. There's no doubt about that. However, it surprises me just how often this problem manifests itself in my personal projects – that is, whatever I am hacking on at the moment. I wonder what causes the problem?

It is easy to give in to the urge to slowly add more features to projects. Its so easy to say "Oh! one more thing!", especially when you are your own boss, and there isn't necessarily anything that needs to be delivered – There isn't necessarily an end goal, or singular, driving purpose.

You'd think it would be easier to have a fixed scope on my own projects. After all, I am the one who defines the scope. I'm also familiar with the problems of scope creep. As a general principle, I think it is probably true that its easier to control the scope on something you define (because I control and define it, after all). However, I let my wandering curiosity influence the direction of the projects I work on. This creates an ever-shifting set of goals that leaves a wake of half-done things behind. This makes sense, because my satisfying my curiosity brings me great pleasure & makes up a huge part of who I am.

The problem, though, is that the spark of understanding comes, not at the end of a project or investigation, but at the beginning of the project when things are still in a formative state. But once that understanding comes, it moves, ever forward.

Another aspect to this is that most of my personal projects do not have an explicit goal I'm trying to achieve. I start with some idea of what I want to do, but the project is defined ad hoc as I work through it. This is fun, but I think it is less effective than having a specific, finite goal in mind (at least effective for producing useful artifacts).

I'm going to go one step further. There's another pattern I've noticed, and this one is a bit less self-indulgent: when something gets too confusing and I get frustrated, I tend to drop the project. I'm probably less worried about this, because normally I change gears and work on something that would fill in my knowledge gaps, hopefully removing those frustrations.

I guess it ultimately depends upon what I'm trying to do. Am I trying to produce things on topics I love, or am I just trying to learn? If I'm trying to learn, is this the best way to do it? Am I just fooling myself, getting exciting about projects and then dropping them?

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I recently started working on SICP again, and it got me thinking about this problem. Initially, my goal was something like: read the book, work through the exercises, and put the results on GitHub. "Oh," I thought, "the code should really have unit tests written to show that it works. I've been wanting to play with RackUnit anyway". A few exercises later, I thought, "I should really look into Scribble for documenting the code I am working on. I could use Plot to create charts in the Scribble docs, and show interactive examples of how it all works through the Literate-like facilities in Scribble".

To be honest, this project definition has grown into something extremely interesting. I just wish it wasn't so much work, a little more finite, and easier to make progress on. As it stands, this is really a huge task. I started writing this post because I wanted to debug my brain, sorting out the threads that compose this phenomenon.

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What lessons can I learn? I think I need to be more careful to think through my project goals, and learn to recognize when I'm changing them – and before changing them, decide if the change is worth the effort.