Getting Real Things Done

Starting your own pet software project is exciting when you're sick of your day job. But, unfortunately, you have to actually deal with your own gripes about software process. My partner and I have been experimenting with this since we started working on QuickDeck, a small webapp that's still "super secret" (as in nobody would really want to use it yet).

Our recent revelation was regarding the structure of our tasks lists. After a while, it's easy for our bug / feature lists to degenerate into a pile of the stuff we weren't sure about or needed to make a call about including it in the project.

Taking a page from Getting Things Done we changed the way we structure our task list - instead of a list of features, we have a list of next actions. As per the mantra of Getting Things Done this inspires us to act, and helps us to do more in the time between our weekly discussions.



This helped us to work more independently and embrace our constraint of only being able to meet up once a week. Now when I've got a minute to kill I can just crank on stuff - like drafting a blog post.