Projects vs Experiments

Gmail was in beta for five years, in fact some people miss the old logo so much and tweak their settings in order to have it back.

Beta, means unfinished, room to improve.  It defines an experiment.

Changing my projects to experiments has a huge psychic change on my ability to engage with them rather than to procrastinate.  You see, an experiment gives me permission to make mistakes, to shift direction if something changes.  An experiment allows me to end up somewhere quite different from where I planned.

Projects are fixed, important, heavy.  If your project doesn't work it has failed, you suck and you will be in terrible trouble in some way.

Experiments are fun, intriguing and they capture the imagination.

When on earth did you ever here somebody describing their current work project as capturing their imagination?

I sorely need the light touch that comes from working on experiments. I think that it allows me to achieve a better result.

In fact, I'm now treating this blog as an experiment.  After doing this for a while I am really getting into writing again and sharing my thoughts.  I don't know exactly how it will turn out.  I allow myself to delete or modify posts and filter at a later date.  And because I'm not beating myself up with expectations that the blog must be correct from the very first post, I feel more encouraged to just do the damn writing.

I know, that like all experiments, this one will have an end.  But when it does I'll know that the result you will be reading will have been prodded, tweaked and tried.  I'm really looking forward to that.

And if this idea resonates with you, I'd love to hear your results or thoughts, either in the comments, on Google+ or via Twitter