Ask HN: How you focus on the project?

Re:Ask HN: How you focus on the project? by beat on Thursday January 18, 2018 @11:17AM (#16178238)

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.

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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.

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Re:Ask HN: How you focus on the project? by beat on Thursday January 18, 2018 @11:37AM (#16178446)

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.

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