If you fit into any of these:
- Your day-job is so demanding that you need to work on some side-project in order to calm down and get back on track.
- Your day-job isn't filling you out so that you feel the need to start some spare-time project in order to burn your overflow energy.
- You just happen to want to try something out that jumped your mind and now wants to get a real-life test.
- You are looking for an excuse to spend your night-hours in front of a computer just as you have been doing all day long, already.
Then maybe you are just in the right mood to get up and working on some fancy little spare-time project. And to keep the motivation on a sky-like level, it may be a good idea to still do some planning, besides it all being just a low-volume, non-essential, and nobody-really-cares kind of activity. Just avoid filling paper with boring long lists if boring long list aren't the most exciting thing you've ever seen invented. Instead, try out some mind mapping. Like this:
It is a little map created using
XMind for the sake of illustrating how the following four main map nodes do a fine job in providing a roadmap for your great little project:
- Vision: This is basically a one-sentence motivation of why you are investing your valuable spare-time at all.
- Backlog: This is a raving list of features you came up with at three o'clock in the morning while everybody else was sleeping well.
- Releases: This is a collection of small version-labelled nodes with entries moved over from the Backlog as you plan to do and release them sometime soon.
- Done: Move all completed releases here as soon as you throw them out the door!
Plain. Simple. Sans magic. Which is all a good thing.
Next up will be just as simple of an idea on how to plan the individual tasks that need to be done to check off the respective Release Backlog entries.
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