It's hard to complete side projects - as we progress, boredom becomes harder to overcome. Dr. Randy Paterson calls this The Project Resistance Curve. The image at the top of this blog post is his personal chart from one project.
Some of the people I admire most are those who are regularly able to reach that 100% mark.
For me, part of completing projects involves overcoming project resistance with strategies like these ones:
- Write down the active side projects that I want to complete.
- Schedule blocks of time (from 20-mins to 2-hours) to work on the projects. Keep these appointments with myself as if they were dentist appointments.
- Make note of new, seemingly life changing other projects that distract my focus.
To whit, here are my...
Active Side Projects
socialarts.club. I have completed an MVP (minimal viable product) that is useful for me. Now I am working on completing an MVP that will be useful for others.
Memorize "The Bowling Game Kata". I am learning this in preparation for presenting to .NET BC on Test Driven Development.
An Introduction to Functional Programming through Lambda Calculus. I am reading this and doing its exercises out of personal/professional interest.
Preparation for a "Magic Show" on April 27th. I have a sold out show on Salt Spring Island that is a follow up to this one: https://youtu.be/lq2Rj1uf05M
Distracting Projects
Staying focused on a project is partly about killing off/not starting other projects such as these ones:
- Building/starting mylocal.farm.
- Contributing to StackOverflow.
- Set up a Discourse installation e.g. on Azure
- Write a book on sleight-of-hand
- Write a 500 word essay on the similarities and differences among asynchronous computing, concurrent computing, and parallel computing.
There will doubtless be other distracting side projects that come up for me over the next months. It will be my job to ignore them and/or write them down here.