On Deciding What Not To Do
I can get casually obsessive about things pretty easily. I get excited about a topic, then sink a few hours into it, then get distracted by something else and never come back.
I’ve seen this happen repeatedly with various computer languages, Blender, and note taking systems, to name a few.
Even today, I was watching a replay of the Mexico F1 race (which has been its own obsession, thanks to the influence of E), and I got to wondering if there was a better way—a more optimized way—to assign the drivers in my Fantasy F1 grid. A quick google search later, and I had discovered a whole discord server and multiple websites of people digging deep into the data and building prediction algorithms.
Of course, I immediately wanted to try it out. I was briefly tempted to use someone else’s algorithm to optimize my current fantasy strategy, but quickly decided that that sounds too much like cheating. If I am going to use an algorithm to pick my fantasy team, I’d better have built that algorithm myself.
So I started brainstorming how to proceed. I picked my tools (primarily a Jupyter notebook with deno), and my strategy (brute force analysis of all possible teams, with weights given to variables such as practice times, DNF chances, etc. And of course, extensive backtesting).
But around about the time that I had decided all that, I started asking myself whether this was a project actually worth doing. I have a pretty full schedule, and I already have two major projects on the immediate roadmaps. So I decided to shelve this fun side project.
Is it something I would really like to do, and something that I would enjoy the process of quite a bit? Yes. But am I choosing to be a mature adult and deciding to prioritize my limited time instead of getting distracted by building fun toys? Again yes.
But that’s not to say that I won’t build it in the future. In fact, this seems like the perfect kind of project to work on during a long plane ride, when I can have all my data downloaded to analyze it.
So I’m going to build a page: Potential Future Side Projects. That’s where I’ll collect all my fun ideas of things to do if I ever have a free weekend/long plane ride. And who knows? Maybe someday I will!
-Jakobus