What can we learn from Hackathons about shipping creative work (and how we can use that to ship more)

Engineers love hackathons because they are fun, but also because of the pressure of shipping something by its completion.

Hackathons are all about building a working prototype in a limited time. The goal is to execute faster. Here’s how the participants do it.

Hackathons participants decide what, how, why they should build the project pre-hackathon. And during the hackathon, they just build it.

In hackathons, often the winning project is the one that’s complete but even incomplete projects are usually more than 80% finished. The projects that fail are the ones where the participants are deciding and researching what to build during the hackathon. And that bad. Why?

Creative tasks like hackathons, writing, coding, designing, etc. require a lot of mental energy. And we have mental energy in limited supply. We can either use it to decide or to execute.

If the goal is to get work done, we need to break down work into separate work sections, i.e., decision and execution.

• Decide on what, how, when, where, etc. about the project.
• Execute, i.e., the act of doing it.

For example, when participating in a hackathon, separate it into two work blocks.

[Decision]: What project will you build and how will you go about it.

[Execution]: Building the project.

We can further sub-divide each work block into smaller blocks if needed — for example, break-down decision into deciding & research, and execution into the building, testing, and iterating blocks.

The same technique can be applied to other creative works such as writing, designing, etc. Follow the above process and you can hack yourself to ship more creative work. Happy hacking!!!

👉 If you like this content, please follow me on Twitter [@maddynator] as I tweet about these topics more often than writing blogs. Not everything I share is long-form to be a blog post in itself.

The topics I tweet about are software engineering, productivity, mental models, and personal development, and some witty programming humor 😁