Introducing the Year of Done

01 Sep 2024

I, in theory, love to create things. Many different types of things, across many disciplines. The only issue with that is that I, y’know, don’t actually finish them. The ADHD gets bad, and often that first phase of planning is far more interesting than the actual work of making the thing itself, which can be costly and tiring.

I’m sick of that attitude.

So I’m challenging myself: Over the next 12 months, I’m going to complete 12 projects with concrete deliverables. I’m going to start working on the project on the first of the month, and by the last day of the month, it has to, in some appreciable way, be in a state I can call “done”. And I’m calling this project “The Year of Done”. Some of these projects may be physical in nature, some of them may be digital. I have some ideas, but I also have a lot of space open. I might write. I’d love to try to develop a (simple) game. One month might even be a project done in the real world. I do have a planned project for December which will involve daily posts.

I also plan to, as I go through this, log my experiences in blog posts throughout the journey. The challenges, the successes, the details. Especially if the project I want to “finish” is something where the only person who can use the deliverable is me, I want there to be something released to the rest of the world.

I am, to be clear, realistic about how software development works. If I release something at the end of the month and never touch it again, then that’s not done, that’s abandonware. But realistically, I wanna release version 1.0. Maybe later in the year a large enough feature might count as a second month, but we’ll see.

The other thing to be realistic about is a failure state. What happens if the end of the month comes and the project isn’t done? I think the answer is this: I’ll post a retrospective about what went wrong, and consider the project, at least for now, abandoned. The next month will then have to be a pretty radical shift away, preferably to a completely different medium. If, after 2 completed projects, I want to try to pick the project back up? I’ll probably allow myself to. Figure out what went wrong, and how I can re-scope to make it doable.

So stay tuned, either today or tomorrow, as I release my first post in the year of done, listing out the specifications for my first project of the year: A self hosted habit tracker.