A personal project management technique

Like most folks that have been in tech, we eventually stumble upon Ycombinator’s Hacker News Forum, in which there was a post titled “The Art of Finishing” . This article explores the challenge of finishing personal projects, but even better than the article itself are the comments about the article from the Hacker News community. If you scroll past the viciousness that tends to float to the top of Hacker News comments, you’ll find a gem of a framework by user, solomonb that outlines his framework he calls “Sol’s Fast Five” to actually complete his personal projects.

I take a step back, look around me, and pick out the first five things I can reasonably achieve in less then a day prioritizing things where I have all the tools and materials at hand. These 5 things are never entire projects, the goal is to maximally decompose the projects until each action is as close to trivial as possible. Once I have my list of 5 things I stop thinking about anything else and strictly work towards those 5 goals. There is a sense of relief in having reduced the scope and the tasks tend to be finished very quickly. Checking them off the list always feels good. Once I have completed my 5 items I start a new list and pick out the next five items. This can feel like a huge reward.

This framework is what I’m going to start implementing for my personal life - but aided by the best project management app ever, Linear.

I set up my new team in Linear, and started creating issues for my portfolio website. Instead of huge task items that always give me anxiety, I’m focusing on tasks that should only take 10 minutes. For example, my list of to-do items today are:

1. Create new hero image for Em dash, en dash, and hyphen blog post
2. Create new hero image for managing up blog post
3. Create new hero image for custom svg icons blog post
4. Remove PGA tour averages blog post entirely
5. Begin designing new home page blog component

After I’m finished with these five tasks, I make sure to add more ten-minute-long tasks to my backlog so that I can jump in first thing tomorrow. Rinse and repeat.

Thanks Sol. You just made me productive again.