When you have to abandon a project? When is it worth pushing on? The sunken cost fallacy at work.

RE: When you have to abandon a project? When is it worth pushing on? The sunken cost fallacy at work.

dougw — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 16:16:00 GMT

I like the mountain hiking analogy and your insights into electronics projects. To add to your points, there is always going to be some opportunity costs to working on a project and there will always be some aspects of it where it is just drudgery work where you aren't learning anything, but is needed to support the aspects that do provide benefits. Even completing some drudgery work can be a satisfying accomplishment.

There are some costs to stopping as well - dismantling and disposing, but the main cost is the stigma of failure. It is smart to rationalize this into being less important or even adjusting the goal to be one of learning rather than a working system. Indeed the completely working project is usually only one of many goals in a project.

I like e14 projects in that we can define or redefine the goals as needed. We can travel part of the way up the mountain on roads built by someone else, and we can forage over to another road in an effort to make progress, or we can park the project until some new inspiration brings it back to life.

I get enormous satisfaction from making a project work, and the harder it was to get working, the more satisfying it is when it works. If you never tackle things that are so hard that there is a high risk of failure, you will never achieve maximum satisfaction from completions. In this regard I view "failures" as a necessary aspect of obtaining maximum fun from projects.

I often set multiple goals for a project, where some have high probability of succeeding and some are risky stretch goals. The easy goals are enough to motivate the project but the stretch goals can turn into a a monumental success. Most projects end up having some setbacks, and often overcoming these provide the biggest satisfaction in the project.

RE: When you have to abandon a project? When is it worth pushing on? The sunken cost fallacy at work.

BigG — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 15:55:56 GMT

I prefer to park or shelve a project for awhile if it starts to become over complex or too tricky to resolve. It's amazing how different a parked projects looks when you come back to them. The success rate is so much higher on a 2nd attempt.

RE: When you have to abandon a project? When is it worth pushing on? The sunken cost fallacy at work.

shabaz — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 15:36:34 GMT

You got further than me! And learned a lot along the way.

I too had an idea to self-construct and purchased a small testbed with a couple of motors one Xmas, but got quickly disillusioned when I saw the poor state of open source elements that would be needed. I thought Machinekit would be a good software base, but looking deeper, the available code made no good use of real-time features in Linux and the underlying hardware (BeagleBone Black), although they offer paid services, perhaps that has better code, but I didn't want paid, closed source for that part of my project (I had reasons).

If the desire is easier prototyping, then there are so many low-cost services, personally I would rather it be their problem

Even making things in larger volumes, it's likely more productive to just pay for a CNC operator to set it all up and churn out dozens or hundreds of an item.

Your needs may be different, but it sounds like you absolutely made the right decision since you mentioned that you forgot the project purpose, i.e. it was not critical to your needs either.

RE: When you have to abandon a project? When is it worth pushing on? The sunken cost fallacy at work.

robogary — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 14:06:21 GMT

Prototypes, mockups, alpha versions builds are never cost effective, altho they can be cost minimized. The adventure of the journey and facing the challenges is the life blood of build.