10 Projects in 30 Days
Intention
- My intention is to challenge myself to deliver consistently and within an artificial deadline I set for myself.
- By fixing the time I want to spend on each idea, I would struggle if I don’t prioritize and execute properly. Doing this would improve those skills for me.
- In Atomic Habits, James Clear calls out that Perfectionism won’t help achieve goals—Repetitions do. He illustrates this through a short story where a group of students tasked with producing as many photos as possible also produced the best photos, whereas the group tasked with producing a single photo to the best of their ability produced mediocre photos1. So, my intention is to put the reps in.
The Specifics
How do I want to go about it? I have decided on 3 days per project. This is not from extensive research, but rather from a guesstimate on how many hours per day I can realistically spend on this and how many hours I need to allocate per project. I arrived at 3 hours per day, and I would spend 10-12 hours of focused work on the project—from idea to release. I also want to show what I do. So, the general idea is to open source them, probably on Github, although there can be some exceptions. I also want to write about the whole experience and publish it. I also set a larger time limit of 30 days for this challenge to give myself a sense of closed scope. So, in essence:
- 10 projects in 30 days
- 3 days per project
- Open source on Github and share progress from day 0
- Collect the experience and learning by writing about it here
Ideas
Though I have not decided what those projects are actually going to be, I don’t think that is going to be a concern. My mind comes up with several ideas every day. The quality of the idea is another matter. Again, the intention is to put the reps in, so I consider it a success regardless of the value the projects create. Of course, I would not deliberately work on an idea which I know is terrible from the start, but it is more common that the idea itself and the judgment about it present themselves at different points in time. So, if the idea turns out to be crappy, so be it.
My first project is going to be something to do with tracking time.
Note: The article was revised by Claude 3.7 Sonnet, using the prompt - Review this piece of article and make the minimal corrections to improve grammar, clarity of content and readability.