For any serious home software projects, I do a lightweight Agile process with Trello. All tasks need to be doable in a single work session of four hours or less - preferably less than one hour. So very fine-grained work.
And I stopped keeping a backlog. If it's important, I'll remember it. But I no longer have meltdowns and analysis paralysis trying to decide what to do next from that hundred-task monster list.
Re:Ask HN: How you focus on the project?
by nailer on Thursday January 18, 2018 @11:28AM
(#16178357)
I like 4 hours too. This is realistically the largest amount of real programming most developers do a day, sans interruptions.
Yep. That's definitely about the maximum mental exertion I can do in a sitting. The important thing, though, is breaking my tasks down to things that I can do in a single sitting. If I have to spread the work out to multiple sessions, I have a hard time picking up where I left off.
A lot of my ideas about how to work were strongly influenced by Cal Newport and Matthew B Crawford.
Eg, 'move from payments to subscription' is a big goal, a smaller one might be 'understand Stripe's subscription API' and 'modify UI for subscriptions'.
I also look at different facets of the problem. UX vs backend vs devops concerns so my works remains diverse and interesting (I'm assuming you're full stack here).