Project Scopes

General TODOs

Some time ago I got tired of my seemingly never-ending todo list, full of technical project ideas (not necessarily software development), personal tasks, etc., and decided to strip it down to the bare minimum. To stay on the list, it had to meet a few basic requirements:

• Realism! Not some pie-in-the-sky cool project that might be cool to do one day if I had unlimited time. I applied this both to technical and everyday life items.
• Not be something so common as to be already ingrained in regular habits/chores
• Not be something so fundamental to comfortable life that if it becomes an absolute necessity overnight, there is no way I could forget because it'd be staring me in the face every day
• Not be something that, while relatively important, is something that simply can't be forgotten because it is already staring me in the face everyday
• Be something fundamental to household maintenance but is needed so infrequently (but also in regular intervals) that I am likely to forget
• Must pass a mentally-calculated cost/benefit analysis

I'm probably missing something but this covers the basic ideas. This cut my todo list down to almost half its size, when including recurring and non-recurring items. Half! Not only did this remove a huge (self-imposed) burden from my mind, it also motivated me to actually work on more of the remaining things. A long list of stuff that part of you knows will likely never even be started is quite the demotivator, especially for someone who is motivated by quantifiable progress metrics.

Finitely Scoped Software Development

In my years of hobby software development, I have lost count of the number of projects I've started then abandoned. I tend to lose interest, then never return. All or most of those projects, while serving specific purposes, had enormous scope potential; let's face it: for part time projects, they might as well have been infinitely scoped because, in hindsight, my vision for them was just too broad to have any hope of completing them with part time effort.