Last day of holiday break. Kids had a stay-up late night so they slept reasonably late this morning. I slept until 6:30 am again, I hope I didn't mess up my 4:30 a.m waking abilities by doing this so frequently through the holiday, we'll see how tomorrow feels.
Today was great on the personal project. I set out to spend a minimum of 5 minutes on it. I sat down and dug in. First I decided to think about how I was approaching the project. I know from a lot of experience that breaking things down tends to make most things all the more approachable. So I broke my project down in two ways. First, I broke it into ten pieces and labeled my chunks in a way that made sense to me given what I'm doing (I know the 00-09 may seem weird just looking at it, but it makes sense behind the scenes.) Then I clumped batches into weekly sprints - I have no idea if this is realistic but I'm going to see how it plays out. Initially, I imagined the whole project running from January through March, if I can move faster on it, I want to. It feels like the right approach. I'm sticking with it.
It took me about 30 minutes to figure out how to break everything out, then another 30 minutes setting up some structural foundation so that moving forward all I have to do is sit down, pop open a document and start typing.
Once I set up my little foundation, my house was still super quiet, so I dug in. Before I knew it three hours had flown by and I had checked 00 and 01 off my list. HOLY MACARONI, that is some really exciting progress!
I should note that I have generated a lot of content for this project already — one of those things I started last year but never finished. I’d say I’m at about 60% complete right now, and the remaining 40% got shelved because it felt incredibly daunting. After breaking it down I feel more excited to finish. I hope I can ride the enthusiasm wave for a while!
Tomorrow will bring with it the day-to-day norms of work, getting kids to/from school and after school activities, recording episode 2 of our new #tinychallenges podcast, an interview with someone who's interested in having me write an article for them, some work on a new conference talk, and the day 04 installment of this here #tinychallenges daily journal. I will keep my target for the personal project tiny (5 minutes or less), because that is what #tinychallenges is all about. If more happens, I'll take it.
See you tomorrow!
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Season 1 - Episode 1 is only 16 minutes long, give it a listen on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/tinychallenges/id1071581340
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