Casual Project Management: An Update

March 16, 2025

A week ago I wrote about the “system” I’m using to get my personal projects done. I just thought I’d give some updates now that I’ve been doing it for a little longer.

It seems to be working quite well. This weekend has been very satisfyingly productive. I want to be clear though. I do not mean “productive” in any “grind” or “hustle” sense. This is only about providing some external direction and focus to help me get my own personal things done. I said it in the last post and I want to reiterate: my list of projects includes things like “read a chapter of a book” and “write a poem” and I consider these to be just as important as writing code to add a new feature to some program.

I’ve started writing down the sequence of tasks I get in my journal, along with a little note about what I did for the task. Normally my journal is a brief and high level summary of my day. I think it will be interesting to have this more granular data. Eventually. I almost feel like I could justify a dedicated notebook for this¹. But really I just like stationery.

I’ve noticed that I don’t keep at it all day. What tends to happen is either I realize I want to work on something specific even if it’s card hasn’t come up so I go to do that. Like when you flip a coin and make your decision based not on which side it lands on, but on your reaction to it: seeing it come up tails reveals to you exactly how much you were hoping for it to come up heads.

The other occasion is that I run into something interesting, or a tricky problem to solve, and I want to just keep doing that instead of jumping to something else. I let myself do that. It’s not a stern system, just something to reduce the amount of time I spend staring at Youtube or playing sudoku, bored, yet unable to stop.