Time-boxed projects

When working as a freelancer, time tracking is always part of the daily business unless you’re not paid by an hourly rate. Personally, I use the macOS app Tim since it is a nicely designed time tracking tool that includes everything I need. When I work on personal projects I’ve never worked with time tracking. Tracking time for personal¹ projects can reduce your Opportunity Fear Of Missing Out , as you can better estimate the time needed for a project and know when to bury a project and move on.

Of course time tracking gives you the measurement of tracking how much time you’ve spent on a task. In consulting or as a freelancer, you’d multiply the recorded time by your hourly rate and send your client an invoice with this calculated amount. In Lessons Learned on 13 failed projects , many of the 13 people mentioned that they don’t know if the project was worth it from a financial perspective. I assume none of them know how many hours they spent on development, marketing and sales. They only know how much money they spent on external service providers, such as servers, hosting and freelancers. It almost looks like their time is worth nothing. If they tracked their time spent on those projects, they could calculate a total amount based on their (previous) hourly rate². And with that, they could decide whether the projects were a financial success or failure.

I often asked myself whether I should continue with my current project or give up on it and start something new. Maybe because of my Opportunity FOMO, maybe because the project didn’t generate the expected profit. Tracking time on the project could give you another clue to help you make a decision.

In the field of stocks, there’s a famous rule that you should follow: Always define a rule to sell the stock before you buy it. Never let your current emotions take over. When a market crisis occurs, you should already have a plan of what to do with your stocks. Don’t sell out of fear. Don’t buy just because prices seem low. You shouldn’t wait a few more days before selling to increase your profit. Instead, you should already have a share price in mind at which you (automatically) sell. This takes your emotions out of the decision-making process.

Such simple rules can also be applied to the decision whether to continue or quit a project. Ideally, you should have predefined objectives, such as # of sales, # of users, or revenue, which determine success or failure. However, many times these objectives can often only be set at a later stage. For this reason, another key figure is your time spent on the project. Tracking time not only helps you figure out how much money you would have spent hiring someone else (or paying yourself), but can also be used to drop your project after working X hours on it. In this case, it’s still important to have yet another rule defined that prevents you from killing your business too early after you have just reached the X hours but have finally gained some traction³.

Side project vs business project

In the introduction, I wrote about personal projects. Later, I focused on business projects. Projects that are intended to be a source of income at some point or are started with the aim to earn money. Side projects are (usually) run with different intentions. A hobby project doesn’t have to be used by someone else. However, sometimes a side project turns into a growing business that profits from the initial personal interest. Many software engineers have a long list of side projects that were started but never finished. One reason why so many projects are never completed is that these projects probably can’t be completed at all. It’s simply impossible. There’s always another feature that needs to be implemented, another bug that needs to be fixed, or another UI improvement that needs to be made. This is the death for so many projects.

With a time-box rule, i.e. setting the amount of hours that you allow yourself to spend on your side project, you can at least try to finish the projects⁴ before the time limit is reached. If you know you only have 40 hours available for a project, you start to prioritize features. You might want to show your project to others, you don’t want it to be buried in your computer’s graveyard.

A time-box rule let’s you rethink on your project. Do I want to spend another X hours on this project? Would I rather work on something else? If your time-box is small enough, managing your Opportunity Fear Of Missing Out will be much easier. You can postpone your desire to work on something else until the end of your current time-box. And the time-box also works the other way around: you must spend X hours on the project. There’s no shortcut. At least you should try and commit to it.

Improved time awareness

Over time, time tracking can help you manage your time better. After a few projects, you may already know how long it will take to set up your next app project, implement your authentication layer or integrate a payment provider. You can use this information for new features, bugs and projects - whether it’s work or hobby related.