Passion Projects
Thank you. For all the supportive comments and emails. It’s been 3 weeks since I took the leap and I’ve already sat down a ton of interesting people for lunch and tea. A surprise for me so far is the number of new projects I’ve had to turn down or pull myself away from. I’m going to tell you about one of these projects.
Meet Will
My friend Will has been bitten by the travel bug (though it’s probably more of a full-on infection). If he could have any superpower, it’d be to teleport to new places on a whim. Will’s also a web developer who’s worked at companies like Google. He approached me at the beginning of the year for some help on a travel planning site he was building. There was no budget, but it seemed like an interesting challenge, so I jumped on as a partner.
We quickly realized there were too many travel planning sites out there already. Most of them tried to be a “one-stop stop all for your travel needs” and many had an overly-tidy view of how travel planning worked. These sites expected you to know what your travel dates were and tried to confine you to a very linear, step-by-step kind of travel planning.
But real-world travel planning looks more like this:
Photo via Philosopher Queen
It’s chaotic. You have a million different websites open, hear recommendations from co-workers, clip articles from the travel section of the Times and bookmark pages in your Lonely Planet guide. All the while, there are emails going back and forth constantly between you and your friends. Most people just end up copying and pasting stuff into a Word document or printing everything out and shoving it into a manila folder.
Our approach
We wanted to be a little more forgiving of all the chaos. No matter what kind of trip you’re planning, where it is or when you’re going to take it, you’re essentially just collecting ideas for things to do, based around a certain location.
We’re calling it Duffel. Here’s what it looks like:
Duffel’s now at a stage where we’re not totally embarrassed to show it friends of friends (some companies call this the private beta). If you’d like to play around with it, leave a comment here or email me directly and I’ll get you in [use this signup link]. Since I don’t have any trips lined up in the near future, I use it to keep track of things I’ve been meaning to check out in New York.
“I think we need a break.”
When you don’t have a steady job, your time suddenly becomes a lot more precious. If you’re doing something and it’s not paying the rent or offering you some kind of unique learning experience, you start asking yourself why you’re not spending the time on your own obsessions.
A few days ago, I told Will I needed to step away from Duffel for the time being. It had turned into a passion project that wouldn’t really help pay my rent (at least not immediately). And while I have no problem working on passion projects, in the end it’s Will’s passion—not mine. He’s the one that obsesses over travel. He’s the one who’ll enthusiastically read every piece of feedback you send in.
We all have our own personal Duffel. Some us need to find it and some already know what it is — we just need to start giving ourselves a little more attention.
