The Importance of Side Project Tiny Tickets
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If you have an active side project, I highly recommend you invest some of your valuable and limited time into ticket/issue creation to plan out your work. Specifically, you should build up a collection of ready-for-work tiny tickets in the 10-20 minute time completion range.
So often, we look forward to long “deep work” programming sessions to make meaningful progress on our side projects, but they are few and far between. We have tons of other life responsibilities from work, family, and friends that will have priority on our time. If we wait for perfect work sessions to make progress, our side projects will take much longer to complete, and the risk of failure (due to personal distractions or loss of motivation) increases drastically.
You need to find ways to move your side project forward during the cracks of daily life, hopefully setting up the foundation of a productive habit loop. Have a little time before bed; here is a tiny ticket to do. Have time to kill waiting for a zoom meeting to start; find a tiny ticket to knock out. Many will be mindless dependency updates or small refactors but little by little, your project will grow.
If you have an active side project, I’d love to ask you some questions to help me with my research. Grab some calendar time here: https://savvycal.com/zorn/chat.