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Always have a small relevant task ready

Rambling about the past

With small side projects, things that tends to happen are:

  • things get out of control. too much information, too much to do and it is poorly structured, organized and prioritized

  • other stuff gets in the way, new projects, life, enthusiasm wears off etc.

Some side projects start as a "what if?" or "that’d be fun thing to have" and it’s fine to stop after that. Because you never really had a clear goal that fit into a vision of how that project would make your life so much better.

It was an interesting to explore, you explored it, learned and that’s about it.

I generally don’t feel bad about abandoning projects but I used to. Every project had to be turned into something polished because after all, people were gonna see it and I had users demanding features and bugs. lol. That’s when I had users. Usually, it was "meh".

Still, I can remember the enthusiasm I felt when I was a student and found a new cool api and was so excited to build something on top of it just to see what could be done with it.

Nowadays however, I rarely have that level of excitement. I do, but the shit I want to build is so complex that enthusiasm is not enough. It cannot be done over a weekend, it takes weeks to build, iterate, refine, learn more, acquire more resources, think "is this a good long term investment and how will it improve my life" etc.

TL;DR A lot more thought goes into side projects then I use to.

The fucking point

The point is, having a small task (no more than 30m) that is 100% relevant and is the most important thing you could do to move that project forward really helps.

Taking the time to document that task before finishing off.

Next time you want to revisit a project, it is not this grueling thing where you have to decide what to work on, where was I, load all this information and have to organize it etc.

No, you just pick that small task and get it done then define the next small / relevant task. That’s it.

I already have todos.php files for each project, I should add them to the map as clickable stuff and have a clear / small task at the top on what would be the biggest difference maker to improve this project.

Also

Also, I find metrics really help. Clarifying what is the metric you use to judge the success of that project really helps you focus and priotize features.

For a lot of projects, I don’t have clear metrics and really, I often don’t want exactly what I want.