At WWDC 2019, I met the developers of Bear, which I consider to be one of the best iOS/macOS apps ever made. In my brief chat with them, I reflected on my struggles finding time to work on personal project apps. I haven’t forgotten the insight they gave me:
You can make progress with just 1 hour a week. But you can’t make progress with 0 hours a week.
It may sound obvious, but this has suck with me. I can build on a personal project by making incremental progress over time. I just needed to find an hour a week!
And yet, despite scheduling many blocks in my schedule to work on personal projects, here we are 4 years later without much to show for myself. After some reflection, I believe my issue is that I don’t structure this time to actually finish anything in those working sessions. If I only have a 20 minute block of time, then I need a task that I can conceivably finish in 20 minutes, otherwise I’ll feel unproductive and time-constrained.
My proposed solution to this is inspired from my day job. At work, the role of a product manager, designer, and engineer are different people. I do all these jobs for my personal projects, but it is helpful to think of these jobs separately. Making a product decision, designing a solution, and writing code can be considered separate tasks. Lumping all these tasks together while writing code is so tempting because it feels like I’m moving faster, but doing so makes it harder to break projects into shorter tasks and make progress with short blocks of time.
This week I tried this out. In my lunch breaks, I spent 20 minutes a day working on the sign-in/sign-up screens in Habituate. One day, I decided on a authentication service and the requirements for account management, the next day I mocked up the sign in screens and account settings in Figma, and the third day I typed up those screens in code and hooked it up to the authentication service. Just ~20 minutes day, less than an hour of work. But at the end of the week, I now have the full feature more-or-less complete. And next week I can move on to something else.
It will still take a long time to finish, but it feels very good to be moving forward.
