Ask HN: How do you deal with an extensive list of pet projects?

I have wide interests, and my problem too for a long time was similar - not being able to decide what to work on, and end up not working on anything much at all. In other words, classic procrastination.

But from past couple of months, I've improved tremendously by "time slicing"...like a CPU. Meaning, I quickly pick a small list of 5-6 interests every morning from my Evernote notes. Rest of the day, I randomly pick one from this list and work for exactly 1 hour on it. Then I pick randomly again and work on that for 1 hour.

For me, the 1 hour time slicing takes motivation, decision and procrastination out of the picture, and replaces them with discipline. Drawing up the daily list of interests is still prone to motivation and mood, but now it's a one off decision, not something I've to do repeatedly rest of the day.

A single time slice results in only a little progress, but cumulatively over a period of a week or month, I've managed significant progress in every one of my interests, including revenue generating ones. I'm nowhere near as frustrated as I used to be.

It may or may not work for you, but even if it doesn't, I'd like to generalize the concept as follows: settle on a process that depends less on motivation and more on enforced discipline. Rather corny way of stating it is, motivation is only the ignition, but discipline is what keeps the engine running and takes one ahead.

I'm in the middle of the most productive streak I've ever had working on pet projects, using a combination of an IDEAS.md file and the GitHub contributions calendar.

IDEAS.md is always the leftmost tab in my Sublime workspace. Every project I have an idle though about, a concrete idea for starting, or a next thing to work on gets a heading. Most of these have just 2 or 3 lines under them. For larger projects, there may be a big bunch of ideas, with some picked out for the next release. Every time I edit what's under a heading, I move it to the top. This keeps a mix of bigger and smaller projects, big and small tasks, high-level and low-level ideas churning in the file, making it more likely to be able to find something I feel like doing right now.

(One of the ideas is to write a React app to automate this)

Above the first heading I keep a list of generic grunt work that needs done and high level things which could be tried with any project, like learning to use new tools. If I'm not feeling it on a particular day, a combination of these and not wanting to break the chain can get me started doing something, which usually leads to other things, even if they're just more ideas.

At the end of every day, I "Close all to the right" on IDEAS.md so it's the first thing I read every morning.

I've found that actively doing at least a little bit of development every day, even when I don't feel like it, has made me more likely to feel like it over the last 4 months and more likely to have a go at something instead of mulling over it. An idea becomes a quick proof of concept. A quick proof of concept gets fleshed out and becomes a project. A project gives you ideas for new features and other, related projects and on it goes.

>The problem I have is something akin to paralysis of choice

Yup, had exactly the same problem myself. What I did was to introduce a ranking score for each project I might want to do and then just do the top one. I constantly add to the list and only remove projects if I do them / have learned they are not going to work / get new information which pushes them down/up in the ranking.

Series of questions I use to evaluate the project: What problem does this solve?; How does the MVP look like?; What is potential monetary upside?; What is potential personal-brand upside?; What are the potential risks?; What is the required time / monetary / etc budget?; Who is this project targeted at most?; Will there be new skills-of-interest learned?; Will this project lead to bigger projects?.

Each question has a 1-5 score slide which I later sum up with custom weights to a "final score" which I then use to rank the projects.

Break the project up into lots of little pieces. Attack the little pieces. Don't do little pieces from other projects until the little projects in your main project on the way to a major milestone are done. As someone who had your problem for a long time: Trust me, it's this simple.

Try using some issue-tracking service to keep things organized to help you plan. JIRA may be overkill, but there are other systems that help.

I have a similar problem and this sounds like a great way to combat it. I'm curious, do you write down the little pieces as a todo list or do you just make a mental note and go about it?

Some of it is mental, but ultimately it does get recorded into a record-keeping system of some sort. It's too hard to always pull out the record-keeping system and keep things in it. However, when the record keeping system looks like it's running on empty, I tend to brain dump into it.

Just tell yourself to have a one-track mind and make your list and record keeping system your life. Never deviate, and just always do little steps always. Every big picture should always be made of thousands of little pictures.

I hear you. There's a number between 1 and ~few that is perfect for you. For me, it's three - few enough that they all see progress, but many enough that I am always in a mood for one of them.

I like having long lists of projects, but if I'm not working on them, they're on a list that I know is non-committal, so I don't feel bad about it.

I find the challenge is not letting new ones creep into my free time once I table most of the old ones.

It's important to remember that it's ok to have an idea and not act on it. You will have way more ideas than you can ever hope to have time for - what's important is that your mind is free to focus on whatever you choose to work on without being distracted.

What has helped me in the last year is to keep writing ideas down but be very selective on those I will work on properly. If I spent a week of free time on every current idea I have so far - that would add up to the next 5 years of my life. It's not sustainable. What I want is to just see some of my ideas come to life.

Also if you're not in the habit of launching products and tools going from 0 > startup is a huge task.

Why not commit 1 weekend to 1 tiny, achievable project (Fri eve to Sunday eve) see how far you can get when constrained by a deadline. No matter how basic, buggy, janky or simple it is - you have to show people on Sunday night & wake up to the response on Monday. You will end up with a project that has seen the light of day and then you can decide if it's worth continuing.

List each project on a piece of paper.

Think "do I want to spend 100 hours making this into something?" Then toss a coin. Heads it dies, tails it lives. You may decide while the coin is in the air. Or when the coin lands you might say "best of three" - these are both great if they're actual choices.

Go through the list and whittle it down to at most three.

Put all the dead projects in a single document / wiki / archive under a "things I want to do eventually" heading.

I'm doing this for money, so I prioritize based on that.

I put everything that I think would be cool to do in a doc. Then I add from 1 to 5 $ signs next to each task depending on how much money I think the task could make, or a ? mark if it has questionable financial value.

For example:

"Optimize documentation pages to rank better in Google - $$$$"

"Improve styling of download links table. - ?"

Then it's really easy for me to decide what to do.

I like to make "prototypes". Projects that show an idea but arent fully implemented or featured.

For example I made a soundboard just today in a few hours. It has a few sound files that play when a user clicks on the image/div and I built some other functions relating to that. The sound boar is a prototype, just needs more fine tuning when I feel like its an idea that should be completed.

As someone who keeps starting new projects, and also swapping which programming language I want to implement my projects in.

My new strategy is to just refuse to let myself start a new project until an old one is finished. Then I need to think more carefully about making the commitment to create the repo in the first place.

By realizing that if I am not working on it, it's not a project but an idea. Like you, I have a very long list of ideas and quite a limited amount of time. So I tend to just pick one or two and ignore the rest until something makes me change my priorities.

And here I am , sitting with no such ideas in my hand with lots and lots of time. Can you share them , if not even whole ideas but subparts for it. I would love to code them.

What are you passionate about? Is there software relating to that passion that could be improved? If so, there is your idea. Even if it's a derivative idea, it would still be a good learning experience.

That is quite the offer. I have a few projects/ideas I have been putting on the back burner. Send me an email.