

Ask HN: How many concurrent projects do you have? - exit

If just one at a time, how do you resist following the tangents which come up in any project?
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kls
As a freelancer, I may have up to 3 or 4 active paying projects at any given
time but I have worked over the years to discipline myself to only one
personal project at a time. I have a queue of projects that I would like to
get to and when I have an interesting thought about them I document it in a
project document but I never do development on them until I am done with my
current personal project. The other rule I have on this is that I am allowed
to jump ship in the first 2 weeks of starting a new personal project an go to
a different idea. This allows me enough time to really decide if this is the
one I want to focus on.

The nice part about being disciplined in this manner, is that ideas that are
nebulous in my mind are usually concrete by the time I get around to them. you
would be surprised how much stuff gets worked out by just having a project
floating around in your mind for a while.

Almost every time I go through my notes when starting a new project, I think
"wow I am glad I let this one roll around in my head for a while" because the
notes create a very clear and coherent idea, by the time I get around to
working on it. And I can usually see by my first notes that if I would have
dived right in, I would have spun my wheels reworking better ideas that just
popped into my head at a later date.

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mishmash
Often work on several projects at a time here.

Keep two text files on the desktop to sort them out, one small file (~200
lines) for concrete ideas and another large file for "future" or less defined
thoughts.

Inside each are project code names and a list of notes underneath each one.
That way it's easy to add and keep additional ideas to the project, but
doesn't require me to log in to a project management app, commit to a repo,
etc.

An unexpected benefit of keeping ideas from many different projects in single
files is that an idea from one section often leads to an additional feature
for another project.

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paulsingh
Right now, four major things on my plate. Most of my organization is with
standard pen/paper.

Tangents don't usually come up... unless you're a paying customer or you've
committed to paying me if I build a specific feature for you.

