Month: January 2018

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Passion Project – Day 1

Day 1 – Wednesday the 10th of January, 2018.

  • I rock up to 313 Halifax to use my share desk with minimal stuff – laptop (sans charger – great start); headphones & a few ideas
  • check crytpo holdings. My latest bigger investment is basically plagiarised from another project. That’s not going to end well… drops 60% in a day. OK – crypto trading is not for me, moving on…
  • busily sift through the ideas:
    • “what was I thinking?”
    • “huge”
    • “should have done it 3 years ago”
    • “.. might have legs?”
      • we have a winner!

Choosing a passion project is both fun and daunting I’ve found. I’ve suddenly got time to do this thing… but then decision paralysis kicks in. Is this the right project? Is one of the other ideas better? Are any of these ideas any good?

What I’ve quickly learnt is after 18 years of doing other peoples’ projects, where I’m there to help and improve upon their vision… suddenly it’s quite different when it’s your project. This is your time, your investment.  There’s an onerous feeling of “I better make the most of this”, which if harnessed well, is quite motivating.

Everyone’s motivations for their passion projects will differ. Mine are reasonably simple: I want to improve my tech skills & I’d like to generate a bit of side income to prove/disprove to myself that it’s worthwhile. But primarily – I want to keep my skills sharp(ish).

Going through the list of ideas, the idea that might have legs, ticks the boxes outlined above.

And with that – I begin. The project is code-named CYLA – it’s an idea from a couple of years ago I casually pitched to a couple of clients, and was met with, “if we had the budget…” and “cool idea” but never went anywhere from there. 

How I intend to go about this:

  • I’m going to have a week break between each day of work – as such, I need to plan this out well and keep good notes of where I’m up to to maintain momentum
  • My primary tools will be:
    • Trello – I’ve created a Trello board with inspiration taken from this board
      • Trello is ideal for mind-mapping out the project but also to go into more detail as you need it
    • Dropbox Paper – I haven’t used Paper before, but it appears to be an ideal method to keep the overall project outline in an easy to use. No frills note taking is basically what I’m after as well as tracking where I’m up to
    • Fiverr – for all things graphical given my complete lack of talent in this area

As for my first day – my accomplishments have been:

  • Settled on “the idea” – ie CYLA
  • Outlined what the idea will try and accomplish & some early key tasks
  • Set up a Trello board with some mind-mapping 
  • Registered a domain name
  • Submitted a request for a logo from Fiverr
  • Set what I need to get done next to proceed

Time spent: 7hrs

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Passion Project – Introduction

I’ve been in the web game since creating my first paid-for website in 1999; and since completing my uni degree, there’s been countless more. 

In all that time however, I’ve never really built much for me. It’s almost always either for my clients or for my business. I’ve run this Honzee blog as a way of keeping track of my travels & some home renovations, but not much more. 

So, with it being a new year and the time for resolutions to either stick or not – I decided I’m going to follow through on something I’ve been thinking about for a while… giving myself a day a week to follow through on ideas that I’ve had on my mind either for a long time or more recent.

With that – Wednesdays for the foreseeable future are now known as “Side Project Wednesdays” as my friends @ 313 Halifax call them, where I’m renting a desk. My intent is to compartmentalise my side projects to just being on Wednesdays, within reason, however we’ll see how that goes. Main thing is – my primary business remains exactly that. Primary.

This blog now takes on a new role… keeping track of what I do on a daily basis. I want to keep myself accountable so I’m going to try and provide as much useful info to anyone who reads this as I can, almost as a diary but also as a way of potentially helping others with starting a new website/passion project.