Dreaming of working for yourself is anything but easy.

Because we’re constantly feeling:

• The anxiety of not knowing where to start.
• The overwhelm of too much information.
• The stress of trying to handle everything at once.

Something that has helped me more than once is to imagine that 80% of the results I seek will come from just 20% of my efforts.

By eliminating what isn’t essential, you make space for what truly matters to get your full attention.

Comments

[Khelil Badro]

there is a CLI named BeB you can use it to create a backend experss and mongodb project in one line try it 😁

[R Steadman]

Stop spamming your cli in every post, especially when it's completely unrelated. Make your own post about it.

[otavio99]

Heyy thanks a lot! I will check it

[Dotallio]

Honestly, focusing on the key 20% made solo work way less overwhelming for me too. How do you usually figure out what that 20% is?

[otavio99]

I don't have a definitive method, but here's something that's been working for me lately:

• First, I write down the main outcome I'm aiming for with a given project or effort.
• Then, I list all the tasks that feel relevant to achieving that outcome.
• From that list, I pick one task that seems most essential, yes just one.
• Over the course of a week or more, I focus only on that task and observe: What other tasks do I feel pulled to do, even when I've already committed to my main one? Then I allow myself to slowly starting the other ones until I feel okay with it.

Doing it helps me see which tasks are genuinely critical versus which ones just feel urgent in the moment.

A personal example: I was building an MVP and kept getting flooded with new ideas. It quickly got overwhelming because I didn't have the time to implement everything. So I picked the one feature I believed mattered most and focused only on improving that for two weeks. When I revisited my long list of ideas afterward, most didn't feel necessary anymore, they were just distractions that seemed exciting at the time.