The Blurb

Reworked my philosphy on project planning / execution, for personal projects. Wrote a small tool to help me with that.

Links:

• atp
• the design doc

I’m busy dog

It feels like every quarter I’ve spent at Pattern I’ve relearned what it means to be busy. Now is this a side effect of learning how to properly prioritize my time, learning to be more efficient, having more time to do things and then immediately filling that time with more things to do. Probably. But I’ve noticed my personal projects have been taking a dip in completion time and been suffering from that dreaded “scope creep”. So ATP was born from that, a tool to help me plan and execute on projects.

le philosphy

I find for my unique flavor for brain chemistry its really helpful to have a framework for most things. In this case I think alot of things I like to do can be fit into the project framework (exercise, code, wood working, dog training etc).

In this new model projects go through four phases

1. Scoping / Experimentation
2. Beta
3. Gamma (optional)
4. Publish

Three’s a couple rules around projects

1. If you go into Beta you are making a decisions to finish it. (you must go all the way through phase 4)
2. I may only have 3 active projects at at time.
3. Scope of the project must be defined before entering Beta

Scoping / Experimentation

Here the goal is to figure out what your working on, learn about whats currently out there if it suits your needs, find a market etc.

Sometimes this phase is the only thing you’ll ever do on a project (thats ok!) the goal is to kill boring ideas before they snowball into the following phases.

Beta

Beta is for buiding a prototype as quickly as possible, it can be ugly/ janky, held together with glue, but it has to be functional and provide value

Gamma

Gamma is for polishing the project, making it look nice, adding features, and generally making it more robust.

Publish

Publish is for releasing the project to the world. You have to release it or it doesn’t count. (this post is me publishing atp)

v0.1.0

ATP is pretty simple right now, its a command line utility that keeps track of projects and their phases/ associated repos. It also provides a easy quick way to edit my todo.txt files (which I use to keep track of my daily tasks).

I’m planning on adding a couple more features to it, but the project planning phase of this got me to keep the scope of the project small and focused. (its working)

The Future

Couple cool projects that I have in mind

1. Integration of the todo.txt file with all my work stuff
2. Integration of the todo.txt file with github issues for my personal stuff
3. Auto time blocking with my calendar (like motion but I wanna build one)

Links:

• atp
• the design doc