The cost used to kill the bad ideas
There used to be a price on a bad idea, and I paid it in weeks.
If I wanted to know whether a thing was worth making, I made it. That was the test. An afternoon of typing to find out the shape was wrong. A fortnight to find out nobody wanted it. The cost was the filter, and it did the killing slowly and honestly, and by the time something was finished I had spent enough on it to know whether I believed in it.
That price has gone. I can describe a thing in the morning and have a working version by the afternoon. Not a drawing of it. Something that runs, saves what it is given, and would stand up to being shown to somebody. I have more finished work on my disk than at any point in my life, and a good deal of it exists only because making it was cheap.
That is not a boast. The filter had been doing work I never gave it credit for. Every bad idea I have ever had used to die of expense. A bad idea gets born now, runs, and looks like the real thing, and working is the least interesting thing about it.
So the choosing is mine, and I am not good at it. I have shipped things that were finished and should never have been started. I have kept a project alive long past the point where I could say out loud what it was for, because the next step was cheap and the one after that was cheaper still.
What I do about it is small. Before I start, I say what the thing is for in one sentence, out loud, to an empty room. If the sentence needs an and in it, it is two things, and neither gets built. When a project cannot answer that question any more it goes into a folder and stops taking my evenings, and I do not tell myself it is paused. A project stays only if I would still defend it if somebody asked why, and not because it was nearly finished.
The tools did not make me a worse judge. What went was the excuse. Expense used to decide for me and I could call that judgement. It was never judgement. It was a bill I could not afford, and it was right more often than I am.
So I say no myself now, out loud, before the work starts, and I am slower at it and I get it wrong. I am still building. I would just rather be the one who decides which of it deserves to be there.