Project pruning
I recently moved into a new apartment with my wife and son and with it came an inevitable downtime in internet access. However, being offline for a bit has allowed me to think about my current projects and where I am going in the next six months and what I should be focusing on. I have realized that I have too many side projects that may or may not add anything to my real goals and getting rid of these projects for good was necessary so that I can stay focused on what it is I really want to accomplish.
Earlier this month as I moved to working almost exclusively from my laptop, I did a lot of housekeeping across all of my hard drives to get everything in one place and backed up. Looking at the list of all of the Visual Studio solution files of half started projects or all the random Eclipse projects, I decided that some action was sorely needed.
I usually keep all of my development work, whether it is C++, Java or something else, under the same root folder usually called projects. This makes it convenient to see everything at a glance and to make sure that everything is backed up as needed. I started my pruning by making sure everything that I was working on was under this folder moving things as needed. I than started to ask myself the following questions about each project in the list:
- What, if anything, will I gain by finishing this project?
- Will completing this project teach me something that will help me achieve my long term goals?
If a project didn’t pass both of these questions, it immediately went into a separate folder that I called shelved-projects. I may or may not come back to these ones but I also didn’t want to just delete them forever as they may have pieces of code that I may need again for some reason. I am going to start making this a monthly routine to keep more projects like this from cropping up and to stay focused on my real goals.
I encourage everyone to do this as often as they feel necessary. It doesn’t even have to be software projects. It could be anything that you had it in your mind to do but for some reason or other you were unable to see it through to the end. Unless it is something to do with remodeling your house. You had better finish it or pay someone to finish it less your spouse gets mad at you!