We’ve all been there – you have an amazing idea for an ambitious personal/hobby project that will leverage a ton of interesting technologies and so something incredible. You start working on one aspect, then realize there’s something else that needs doing first so you switch to that, then another issue comes up and you realize you need to do THAT, and then you just find yourself thrashing and context switching so much you don’t get anything done to the point where you just bail on the whole thing.
At least, I’ve been there. I won’t go so far as to say I have ADD, but I do tend to get easily distracted by flights of fancy and the like when I’m working on stuff that isn’t, you know, work. Like, even as I was typing that sentence, I was thinking about 8 different things, one of them being “should I make the obvious joke where I interrupt myself and say ‘squirrel!'” and you can see, I’m digressing. In any case, for me, having a GOOD plan when I start working on a personal project is absolutely essential to getting things done.
If you haven’t had that problem, then this post is not for you – if you’re one of the rare people who is naturally very disciplined and focused, I’m jealous, but you can skip on past. For everyone else, here’s a technique that has helped me.
Here I’m presenting the methodology I use when working on a personal project that helps keep me from being distracted. I will use Hoshi, the home automation project I wrote about previously, as my example, since I’ll be doing these steps anyway while I work on it.
The steps of my process are pretty straight-forward:
- Come up with an idea for a project
- Figure out what my product MUST do and what my project SHOULD do
- Break a high-level description of the project into very small, detailed, pieces
- Turn those details into specifications
- Implement the specifications
- Put everything together
It’s not rocket science – people will look at the steps I’ve outlined and say “well, DUH” – but the point here is to provide a lightweight conceptual framework that lets you Get Stuff Done, and honestly most of that is just common sense.