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Managing your retro projects...tips?

I feel all the pain. Sheesh I have a project just to keep track of my projects. Walking around the house, the backyard, the garages I remember projects I've put aside for one reason or another. (Not even going to mention the 4800 sqft warehouse which probably reveals 2 or more stashed projects every step I take in there.)
After I retired I thought great I I'll have the time now to dust off the projects and finish them up. Ha.
As I said earlier, one of the projects is project(s) management. So I started a spreadsheet.
Name of project is a column which I keep adding entries. I have another column called priority which I've not filled anything out yet.
All projects I'm putting in there, like scanning family photos, things I want to investigate,things I want to restore, PDP8, PDP11, analog computers, cars, player piano, Atari Pipeline pinball, SFBA Living Computer Museum,... the list goes on and on.
I can only keep a few things in my top priority list that I'm actively working on. I'm really good at defocusing out and ignoring projects that are of lower (sometime temporarily) priority to me. (To my wife's dismay for projects we don't agree on current priority).
But the master spreadsheet of projects has become important.
I need to add columns for estimating time to complete, dependencies, what is it waiting on (why am I not currently working on it), etc.
I probably need to add an importance column (not same as priority), maybe it would say why important, not just a rank.
Probably a "who else wants this" column.
But any way, this process has helped me realize the scope of my projects and I start to realize it will take more than a lifetime to complete all of them.
There is some comments about when to abandon a project. I would hate to think about projects like that. I would prefer to believe that it is likely there might be someone else that would now be better to take over the project. If that person can be found, then that can actually be the best outcome. I could enjoy seeing a project of mine come to life without spending the the time on it.
I think I'm rambling now, but my point is, if you have so many projects, you might want to just start with creating a list of them Also one other point popped into my head while typing this. I think we all like to remember the fun things in our past, in days of old people made scrapbooks to remind people of those memories, those pictures are like keys that unlock memories. Getting stuff written down in a well known place allows me to not ever worry about forgetting those projects.
And it can also show me how daunting my project list is, take a look at the actual importance of a project, and then decide, to let it go to someone else.
And then I also need to fight the constant urge of "Oh look another shiny thing to play with or take apart"
cheers all,
dale luck
 
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syzygy said:
What do you do when fun projects become chores?
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Find somebody else that wants to do them: sell it, trade it, or pass it along. Better somebody who really enjoys it and wants to do it right than to half-ass it just to get it done. I have spent way too much time un-doing somebody else's "chores" that they clearly weren't interested in enough to do right.

This is a really good topic though. I feel like my blog helps me stay organized and always has good notes and photos I can look back on to help me finish long term projects. I have many unpublished posts that I use like a notebook. And a separate box for each project is helpful too. With the number of projects I have, the discipline to finish one (of the many) before starting another has been my guiding principle and ambition lately. That helps to make the less exciting projects a little more tolerable- knowing that I get to start a new one once it gets done.

If I ever get to the point that I need to make a spreadsheet of my projects and can't just look at a few labeled boxes on a shelf (or systems on my work table), I will know that I have way too many projects!
 
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epooch said:
If I ever get to the point that I need to make a spreadsheet of my projects and can't just look at a few labeled boxes on a shelf (or systems on my work table), I will know that I have way too many projects!
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I'm looking at that through the rear-view mirror.
 
At the moment I am in between projects...meaning I just finished one and have taken a couple of days before starting the next thing.

In deciding which one to do next (I have plenty of in-progress ones), I was thinking about the old adage...begin with the end in mind.
That is something that I learned long ago in my professional life and it served me well. Not being too deeply introspective here, but I can't help but realize that a lot of my projects get started purely out of curiosity, or for lack of a better phrase, because I feel like it". I'm not sure that is, necessarily, a bad thing, but maybe I could benefit from a little bit more of the old adage :)
 
wrm said:
...readme driven development.
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I can't recommend this enough.

I didn't come to it through that page, or the idea of READMEs at all, but instead by trying hard to write good commit messages that properly explained, at a high level, what I had done and why I had done it. I soon started noticing that the better I got at this, the more often I realised I'd written the wrong code and had to go back for a rewrite to do what I really should have done from the start. So then I started writing my commit messages first (at least sometimes). And then readme-driven-development came along and I thought, "yeah, that's what I've been doing, in a certain way."

The nice thing about it is that you can have a serious think about what you want to do, write it up, commit it, and somehow it all just seems easier than actually writing code (even though it really isn't).

The only thing I should mention about that write-up linked above is that the guy has fallen into the trap of "agile has no design." ("Now we have projects with short, badly written, or entirely missing documentation. Some projects don’t even have a Readme!") XP, the original agile (at least in the software world), never suggested that you don't write documentation if you feel it's useful, and had a core practice called the system metaphor, which is a shared understanding of the system as a whole that everybody must understand. You might do this through documentation on a large team, or just chatting in a small team, but it's got to be there. And, as usual, it's one of the things that a lot of other "agile" systems leave out. (I often feel as if most people doing agile are sort of half-way doing it, picking the easy practices from XP and ignoring the hard ones.)
 
I had a 24 point "Projects to do list". I scratched off 15 line items and have started who knows how many since without ever adding them to the list. I dont really look at the list even though its taped to my wall next to my desk.
 
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I dont put priorities on things in my hobby, which makes things easier. I just work on what ever is interesting to me at the time. Thats the luxury of a hobby.

I think I have about 3 or 4 projects "in flight" at the moment, in various stages of completion. One of them in particular is taking the lions share of my time, but not in a bad way. It just happens to be the most fulfilling project with the most potential for fun and interesting work that I have on the go at the moment, so Im naturally putting most of my effort there.

Once I start to get bored of it, which does happen from time to time, I just take a break from it. I'll either do nothing at all, something entirely different (like house work!), or pick up on one of the other projects. If something isnt interesting or exciting to me, I wont obligate or put myself under pressure to work on it. Thats what you'd expect in a 9-5 job, so Im not going to force that upon myself in my personal time when I want to have fun.

The way I see it, hobbies are for fulfilling personal interests and desires, and those can certainly evolve over time, and sometimes rapidly. So definitely, I think its entirely possible that sometimes you might just want to work on something else, and Im fairly sure that has happened to me in the past - I have numerous projects in various states of completion which were once my passion and now are collecting dust on a shelf. I dont have a problem with that either. :)
 
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