We’ve started using Agile in our team at ESPN, and the experience has made me see just how discombobulated my strategy for working on side projects is. Starting this week, I’m taking some Agile-ish concepts and getting them into my workflow.
One of the problems I have is I’ve got two (well, three, but one has been way on the back burner) projects going on at once and I’m constantly going back and forth on this and that. This context switching from day to day even makes it almost impossible to make real progress.
Each week I’m doing a little sprint. Each sprint will focus on one project. For now I’m just going to cycle through all three projects week by week. Taking away my ability to just hack on the little thing I want to hack on will help me get shit done. If the nature of deadlines or tasks that need to be done requires it, I will adjust my plan a bit. But I want to make sure I’ve got my weeks’ planned well in advance.
I’m pulling my projects and tasks into Omnifocus and doing my planning there. I really want to love Omnifocus, but it feels like the learning curve is so steep. So if you have any tips or workflows for Omnifocus, I’d love to hear them. If it ends up creating too much friction I’ll just move back to Things, which has been my old standby for years now.
Maintaining discipline with a project you work on alone is tough. It’s time to get proactive about my planning.