I tend to work on a lot of projects simultaneously. Actually, I try not to do them simultaneously, it messes you up if you’ve got to context switch too rapidly through your day. But I start lots of projects and put them aside for a week or a month when something else comes up. Sometimes they get revived, sometimes not.
And that means lots of failures. Either from lack of interest or time or both. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing but there are two things I wanted to be more mindful about related to this process: being clear when I “archive” a project (decide to stop working on it) and having a better understanding of the stuff that I want to do and how long it’s been since I worked on it.
To that end, you’ll find my quick tracker on the left side of the page. It’ll highlight any projects mentioned in the current post or give you a list of everything on the main page. Plus it’ll show a visualization since the last time I posted about each project (hopefully equivalent to the last time I actually worked on it) and archived projects will be listed below that with an indication of if they’re “finished” or not.
The idea of something being “finished” isn’t super important to me. I’m far more concerned that I keep trying to learn new things than about bringing each idea into a fully formed state. Some ideas are interesting but a product that is based off those ideas isn’t. Who’s to say you have to make everything into a product anyways?
The important thing is that we try again.
So this is going to keep me honest. I want to report a few times a week on progress for each item that isn’t archived, forcing me to move forward or abandon an idea.
Ideally, I’d like to have 2 active projects at a single time and be strict about not working on archived projects until there’s time to do so. Maybe that means building a little backlog of PRs on github before I make a new release but that could be OK, I’ll give it a shot at least.