So, what advice would you give for combating scope creep? This seems to be the primary thing that prevents me from successfully completing projects in my personal life.
Man, that's a big one. First, let me direct you here: https://northmacservices.com/avoiding-scope-creep-in-web-design-projects/ This is an article I wrote for my business with how we handle scope creep. I'm not entirely sure the nature of a "project" in your context, but feel free to provide any helpful details and I'll see what I can do.
Second, probably the single most helpful piece of advice I've ever been given on scope creep is to adopt a "Fixed time, variable scope" approach. In other word, you decide in advance NOT "this project constitutes X, Y, Z scope," but rather "this project will be done in a maximum of X days/weeks/months, etc."
If the scope is allowed to shift within a time period, that's an okay thing. It might mean taking the "scope hammer" to the ORIGINAL scope and cutting it down. So, let's say you are talking about research projects. You could say, I'm going to give myself a maximum of 6 weeks for a research project. And that deadline becomes concrete. Give yourself scarcity to limit how much you can reasonable do within it.
Does that help? (PS. I know I still owe you a response to another comment. I've got it planned to respond to you as soon as I can get to it ;])
Let me give an example: I've recently been studying various young earth perspectives on Genesis 1 and cosmology. I began with a word study of various key words from Genesis 1. In doing so, I began by categorizing what was being referred to by every instance of the Hebrew word for "water". I was planning to move on to the other words after finishing, but I was somewhat burned out with the monotony of it.
About that time, I started the task of reading everything I could get my hands on that Russell Humphreys has ever published. I had already seen some significant problems with his biblical exegesis as well as his physics derivations, and I wanted to confirm that I was understanding him correctly. I was nearly finished with that when I began wondering whether other things he has been involved in have been similarly affected. Specifically, his three main areas of research have been planetary magnetism, cosmology, and helium diffusion from zircon crystals and accelerated cooling (as part of the RATE project). Since his cosmology to various degrees informs his approach to the other areas of research (except possibly helium diffusion), I'm interested to understand how many of these things are effected. These things are further important because the issues identified in the area of cosmology raise significant concerns about the quality of his work and more broadly the quality of peer review.
As such, I've made significant progress scouring the various creation research archives for things written by him and things citing his work (so far, Zotero reference database contains 273 items ... I think the only thing missing at this point is adding in uncritical citations of his work). Eventually, my goal is to be able to publish a comprehensive review of Humphreys' life's work specifically (my hope being that I will be able to say, "While his cosmology should be discarded, his other work is solid and should be built upon.") as well as a history of young earth cosmology. This will obviously end up being broken up into separate pieces and probably published as separate papers in a series. But that can't be even started until I've finished the literature survey. All that to say, when I started this project, I thought I would be able to publish something just focused on different approaches to the exegesis of Genesis 1. But the more I've dug into it, the more the project has expanded.
The challenge I'm seeing is that if I were to take the "scope hammer" to portions of it, I'm not sure what they would be because I feel like everything is so interdependent and if I hold off on one part so I can publish some other part, the part that gets published will be significantly weaker because it is missing the part I put on hold. If I could stick to it and actually get the project finished, that might be one thing. But I've done something similar with projects in the past (remember us talking about doing a series of articles discussing Unseen Realm a while back? ... Yeah, same thing, and that's not the only example.), and I'm concerned this will just keep happening, and 40 years from now, I'll have 20 huge projects somewhere between 25 and 75 percent complete and nothing to show for it. I'm beginning to think (thinking out loud here) I need someone who I can provide (weekly?) status reports to on a weekly basis who can give me encouragement/critical feedback and help me strategize a path forward. I say that not to try to hint that you should be that person (though, if you wanted to be, I'd be open to that), but rather to point out that I don't have similar problems with projects at work and the primary difference is I have people external to the project who can see scope creep when it begins to happen and help mitigate it. Thinking about who that person could be, the first natural choice would be my wife, but she's not really in the creation science "world" (her interests are more in the realm of education, mind development, intelligence, etc.) that much so I don't know that she would be able to give me the knowledgeable feedback I need. There are some other guy friends (obviously, you'd be included here) that might be able to help, but with all of them, I'm not sure they would have the time to be able to commit to it.
So, what advice would you give for combating scope creep? This seems to be the primary thing that prevents me from successfully completing projects in my personal life.
Hey Tim! Appreciate the question.
Man, that's a big one. First, let me direct you here: https://northmacservices.com/avoiding-scope-creep-in-web-design-projects/ This is an article I wrote for my business with how we handle scope creep. I'm not entirely sure the nature of a "project" in your context, but feel free to provide any helpful details and I'll see what I can do.
Second, probably the single most helpful piece of advice I've ever been given on scope creep is to adopt a "Fixed time, variable scope" approach. In other word, you decide in advance NOT "this project constitutes X, Y, Z scope," but rather "this project will be done in a maximum of X days/weeks/months, etc."
If the scope is allowed to shift within a time period, that's an okay thing. It might mean taking the "scope hammer" to the ORIGINAL scope and cutting it down. So, let's say you are talking about research projects. You could say, I'm going to give myself a maximum of 6 weeks for a research project. And that deadline becomes concrete. Give yourself scarcity to limit how much you can reasonable do within it.
Does that help? (PS. I know I still owe you a response to another comment. I've got it planned to respond to you as soon as I can get to it ;])
Let me give an example: I've recently been studying various young earth perspectives on Genesis 1 and cosmology. I began with a word study of various key words from Genesis 1. In doing so, I began by categorizing what was being referred to by every instance of the Hebrew word for "water". I was planning to move on to the other words after finishing, but I was somewhat burned out with the monotony of it.
About that time, I started the task of reading everything I could get my hands on that Russell Humphreys has ever published. I had already seen some significant problems with his biblical exegesis as well as his physics derivations, and I wanted to confirm that I was understanding him correctly. I was nearly finished with that when I began wondering whether other things he has been involved in have been similarly affected. Specifically, his three main areas of research have been planetary magnetism, cosmology, and helium diffusion from zircon crystals and accelerated cooling (as part of the RATE project). Since his cosmology to various degrees informs his approach to the other areas of research (except possibly helium diffusion), I'm interested to understand how many of these things are effected. These things are further important because the issues identified in the area of cosmology raise significant concerns about the quality of his work and more broadly the quality of peer review.
As such, I've made significant progress scouring the various creation research archives for things written by him and things citing his work (so far, Zotero reference database contains 273 items ... I think the only thing missing at this point is adding in uncritical citations of his work). Eventually, my goal is to be able to publish a comprehensive review of Humphreys' life's work specifically (my hope being that I will be able to say, "While his cosmology should be discarded, his other work is solid and should be built upon.") as well as a history of young earth cosmology. This will obviously end up being broken up into separate pieces and probably published as separate papers in a series. But that can't be even started until I've finished the literature survey. All that to say, when I started this project, I thought I would be able to publish something just focused on different approaches to the exegesis of Genesis 1. But the more I've dug into it, the more the project has expanded.
The challenge I'm seeing is that if I were to take the "scope hammer" to portions of it, I'm not sure what they would be because I feel like everything is so interdependent and if I hold off on one part so I can publish some other part, the part that gets published will be significantly weaker because it is missing the part I put on hold. If I could stick to it and actually get the project finished, that might be one thing. But I've done something similar with projects in the past (remember us talking about doing a series of articles discussing Unseen Realm a while back? ... Yeah, same thing, and that's not the only example.), and I'm concerned this will just keep happening, and 40 years from now, I'll have 20 huge projects somewhere between 25 and 75 percent complete and nothing to show for it. I'm beginning to think (thinking out loud here) I need someone who I can provide (weekly?) status reports to on a weekly basis who can give me encouragement/critical feedback and help me strategize a path forward. I say that not to try to hint that you should be that person (though, if you wanted to be, I'd be open to that), but rather to point out that I don't have similar problems with projects at work and the primary difference is I have people external to the project who can see scope creep when it begins to happen and help mitigate it. Thinking about who that person could be, the first natural choice would be my wife, but she's not really in the creation science "world" (her interests are more in the realm of education, mind development, intelligence, etc.) that much so I don't know that she would be able to give me the knowledgeable feedback I need. There are some other guy friends (obviously, you'd be included here) that might be able to help, but with all of them, I'm not sure they would have the time to be able to commit to it.