Richard Hart

Head of Something @ Somewhere
Kent, UK

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Boring work is important work

Whether your starting a new project, company, job etc, you all too easily get caught up in the initial whirlwind of getting things off the ground. It’s exciting creating that new empty git repository, making your first few initial commits and hobbling together the start of what you imagine to be the next startup success story. Then a few weeks in that excitement fades and you’re faced with an ever-increasing mountain of tedious and boring things that need to be done. The project soon becomes boring and the temptation to jump ship and work on the next exciting idea rears its head like an itch that screams to be scratched.

No one will ever tell you that 90% of the work that you’ll need to put in will be boring. That you’ll have to grind out immensely boring things to move towards your goal of completing your project. That’s why so many startups fall by the way-side. That’s why there are so many projects on Github that once showed immense promise, but now just sit abandoned as a sea of issues and pull-requests mount up.

The ones who make it aren’t the ones that are doing the exciting work, it’s the ones that can face up to the challenge of seeing things through until the end.

Your project’s most boring work, will sometimes turn out to be your project’s most important work.