I have a slightly awkward relationship with knowing what I am doing.
I like getting there.
I am less interested in being there.
Something catches my attention and, for a while, I become extremely easy to distract with it. I want to know how it works, why it works that way, whether the accepted answer is actually right and what happens if I pull one part of it apart and reconnect it somewhere else.
That phase can take over completely. Research, software, music, business ideas, local history — the subject changes, but the pattern is remarkably consistent.
Then eventually there is a moment where the fog clears and I think: Oh. Right. I know how to do this now.
You would imagine that would be the rewarding part.
Quite often it is where the boredom begins.
Experience is useful because the machinery keeps changing
Technology is particularly accommodating if you have this sort of brain, because the ground refuses to stay still.
A project that looks familiar can become interesting again simply because the sensible way to build it has changed. A website I might automatically have put on WordPress years ago might now be better as a tiny static site. Another project that sounds almost identical in the first five minutes might genuinely need a CMS, media pipeline, authentication and a proper publishing operation behind it.
The tools change. The trade-offs change. What is cheap changes. What is difficult changes.
I like that because it lets experience remain valuable without turning experience into a set of answers I repeat forever.
Twenty years of doing something should help me recognise the shape of a problem. It should not oblige me to solve it with the same machinery I used twenty years ago.
There is a satisfying point where an old instinct meets a new capability and you suddenly realise the answer can be better than the one you would have given before.
That is the bit I enjoy.
Festival Explorer was supposed to be a map
One of the clearest recent examples has been Festival Explorer for Music Kite.
The starting problem was simple enough: help somebody understand a festival site.
So, obviously, map.
Then I started getting properly into the spatial side of it — real coordinates, PostGIS, calibrated artwork, physical areas and objects that could connect back to the rest of Music Kite's event data.
At some point the idea stopped being “put useful things on a map” and became something much more interesting. A stage was not simply a drawing. It was a real place that also knew what was scheduled there. A vendor was not merely a marker. A festival area could be represented visually without the visual layer becoming the source of truth.
The map had become an interface into the event.
That was one of those moments where several pieces suddenly connected and I thought, with considerably more enthusiasm than I normally allow software to provoke: this is going to be a game-changer.
What mattered was that solving the original problem did not close the subject down. It opened it up.
I could see more questions immediately.
That is probably why Music Kite has kept my attention for as long as it has. Most solved problems become less interesting to me. This particular project has an irritating habit of revealing another layer just as I think I understand the previous one.
Most projects eventually lose the mystery
The less convenient version of the pattern appears when the opposite happens.
There comes a point where I can see the entire remaining route.
The architecture is settled. I know how the thing should work. I understand the difficult bit. The remaining tasks may still require time, care and skill, but there is no longer much discovery in them.
And then I have to finish the bloody thing.
This is where “I know how to finish it” can start masquerading as “it is finished”.
In my head, the uncertainty has gone, which means the problem feels solved. Reality is annoyingly literal about this. The code still needs to be written. The article still needs editing. The responsive layout still needs fixing. The mix still needs checking. The final awkward edge cases continue existing despite my intellectual satisfaction at having understood them.
That final stretch is often difficult for me for a very simple reason: I have already had the reward.
At the beginning, the reward was discovery.
At the end, the reward is relief.
Both are real, but they feel completely different.
Unfinished things are especially seductive when something new appears
There is always another door.
That is one of the problems with being interested in lots of things. The moment one project has become predictable, another question appears carrying precisely the quality the first one has lost.
Mystery.
The new thing has no established route yet. I have not worked out the answer. It may be possible. It may be impossible. It may turn into something more interesting than the original question.
Meanwhile the old project is sitting there asking me to check mobile spacing.
You can see how this goes.
If I followed the instinct entirely, I would become extremely productive at producing fascinating unfinished objects.
That is not quite the same as producing useful work.
So I have had to treat finishing as a separate discipline rather than assuming it will naturally happen once I have solved the interesting part.
Discovery opens possibilities. Finishing closes them. At some point I have to say: this is the version, these are the boundaries, and the rest is not happening now. I do not have to feel inspired by that bit. I do have to do it.
Some things get finished because another person needs them. Some because they are commercially important. Some because 80 per cent of the work has very little value if nobody ever gets the other 20 per cent.
And some because unfinished work occupies mental space in a way that completed work does not.
Relief is a perfectly respectable reward. There is enormous pleasure in being able to put something down and say: done. Next.
Not excitement. Closure.
Closure is underrated.
I do not want to cure the part that causes the problem
It would be easy to turn this into a productivity article about fixing a personal defect.
I am not interested in doing that.
The same tendency that makes the last stretch of some projects tedious is also the thing that gets me far enough into unfamiliar subjects to make anything interesting in the first place.
It has taken me into software, music, history, design, business and a considerable number of things nobody sensible would have arranged into one career plan.
I do not want less curiosity.
I want better boundaries around what happens after curiosity has done its job.
There is a difference.
The genuinely good projects are often the ones where understanding the first problem does not kill the interest. The answer makes the room larger. One solved question reveals another question that is genuinely worth pursuing rather than merely providing an excuse not to finish.
Those are rare enough that I notice them.
But even then, there has to be a point where something becomes real enough to leave my hands.
Knowing what I am doing is not the end of the project.
It is just the point where curiosity stops doing all the work for me.