Comments on: Managing My Time and Avoiding Side Project Overload

By: How Do You Develop Your Skills?

How Do You Develop Your Skills? — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 21:01:44 +0000

[...] I’ve spent time talking about my love / hate relationship with my side projects and the time that they consume, but side projects do have a purpose. They allow me to practice my skills while building something [...]

By: Maximize Productivity Without Burning Out

Maximize Productivity Without Burning Out — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:01:55 +0000

[...] standards. Take a hard look at where you spend your time and figure out which of those activities — business and personal — are the most [...]

By: WebWorkerDaily » Archive 5 Tips For Making Better Use Of Your Time «

WebWorkerDaily » Archive 5 Tips For Making Better Use Of Your Time « — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:11:16 +0000

[...] Managing My Time and Avoiding Side Project Overload [...]

By: Sean Johnson

Sean Johnson — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:20:49 +0000

Dawn,

I designed BubbleTimer for this exact problem, ensuring you spend enough time on tasks that you’ve decided are truly important.

My problem has always been trying to do too many things at once. I use BubbleTimer to set daily and weekly time goals on the important things and to hold myself accountable. It works out well for me. Check it out.

Thanks,
Sean

By: Ronald Hell

Ronald Hell — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 14:18:27 +0000

I strongly agree Larry McKeogh: “Having goals really is my secret to being productive.”
Concerning the other comments I too agree, that it is important to know at the beginning of first projects how much time they need. However, if you are familiar with your profession it is no longer necessary, that’s my experience.
Instead you waste time by creating statistical values only about the time demand of your projects. If you have to document time for your customer/client or whomsoever to be able to charge him/her, it naturally seems ok, but for this purpose you need not – time consuming – collect statistical data. When it is necessary to estimate the duration of a certain project I make many of my estimation by rule of thumb. It never has been less accurate than fussy use of previously collected time data. The larger the project, the more interdependencies may overthrow your perfect plan. My way is, to estimate as best I can, pile up the parts within a Gantt sheet or similar and then invest more time into dynamically guide the project. Nobody will see the real future and the best knowledge about duration of tasks cannot avoid troubles.
Possibly, I don’t have too less imagination of your kind of work. However, my experience is, that often the worst side project is too much analyzing, categorizing, elaborated prioritizing instead of applying time agility in using a few time management criteria only.
And every moment be aware of your goal!

By: WebWorkerDaily » Archive Improve Your Twitter Efficiency «

WebWorkerDaily » Archive Improve Your Twitter Efficiency « — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:28:52 +0000

[...] been on a time management kick lately with posts about reducing my side project overload, managing my time through better prioritization of activities and using Harvest to track my time. One of the things I [...]

By: WebWorkerDaily » Archive My Time Management Saga Continues with Harvest «

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:35:56 +0000

[...] problem. My first step was to reduce my side project overload, followed by improved discipline managing my time through better prioritization of [...]

By: Larry McKeogh

Larry McKeogh — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:00:03 +0000

Self management is a continual struggle. Non-biased feedback is one way I try to stay on top of this. A couple of tools I use that automatically track my on-line and desktop activity are Wakoopa and RescueTime. Both show time spent using various apps along with site time as well. I also use PageAddict to tag various sites and breakdown my visits on a personal level.

I still have an Excel spreadsheet that I use for other time management activities and planning. While the above sites are good to tell me what I have done, the spread sheet allows me to project what I am going to do for the week and try to hit those goals. Having goals really is my secret to being productive.

Good luck, everyone needs to take their own path.

By: Avery Otto

Avery Otto — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 19:01:15 +0000

My favorite application is http://www.code-roller.com where time managment and project management are interwoven. Your detailed designs get automatically converted into tasks that you can load balance with your defect fixing tasks and any tasks (like prioritizing your paid clients).

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 22:25:58 +0000

Great article. I also found a 5 part (and it seems ongoing) set of articles on optimizing your time on projects like this here -> http://timwarddevelopment.blogspot.com/

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:21:57 +0000

I’m pretty bad at turning down side projects (and in my case, I’m the one proposing them – there just always seems to be a good reason to do them… =)

Let me be biased and recommend TimePoke (an app we built on Google App Engine).

What I’ve discovered is that the most important part of keeping track of your time is that it helps you stay on task and gives you immediate feedback on how long a specific task took (I think we all have trouble estimating time – not just engineers =).

By: Anelly

Anelly — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 08:41:22 +0000

It’s good to have all the the projects well structured, to see how much time you can spend on projects and which are the most important. Good time management idea.

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:42:22 +0000

I agree Dawn – and too many side projects won’t just compromise your business, they can wreck your quality of life.

My policy from now on is that if there’s a side project I think I would like to do, I will take it on, on a limited trial basis only. I put a time limit on it and at the end of the trial period if it’s not working out I ditch it.

You need to be pretty ruthless about this and not allow yourself to be persuaded by other people’s disappointment.

Tim