Don't shun me! Hear me about before you just look down on this as 'management bullshit' or anything like that. I'd like serious helpful replies here from people who have experience planning, scheduling, and sticking to schedule with their projects. I know projects are complex and have many variables but planning can and does help (it helps me, but I'm not great at it) but I need to learn more on it. So rather than googling the dreadfully boring theories, I decided to ask people who might actually apply it.
I'm open to all advice, but specifically I'm interested in the following:
I know you can schedule tasks that have well defined times associated with them, but how do you plan for and schedule a project you wish to complete that you know you'll need to learn a lot for? Since you may have no idea on some parts of the projects, how do you even begin to schedule those in any slightly accurate way?
How long should planning the project take? I know this is a bit of a 'who watches the watchers?' question, but I thought it'd be worth asking.
The planning is equally complex as the project you want to plan.
Some points of attention
start with writing down what you do every day and how long it takes and you will see that overhead thingies email, tweets, phone etc takes 2.5 hour per day (guestimate). That means with a working day of 8 hours you are only productive ~6.5 hours or 80% at best. Add/subtract coffee and restroom , make that a 75%. reality is probably worse.
learn a thing about time management (google - Getting things done GTD)
Be pessimistic in how much time things costs, count in slack, time for sickness for unexpected drawbacks
be honest to yourself if you estimate how much time somethings take. Don't know can be the better answer.
only after much measurements one knows how much time things costs to do, and only then planning can be realistic.
Succes,
Rob
PS, Hoffstedters(?) law "everything takes twice as much time as you think even if you consider hoffstedters law.
Arduino projects are a hobby for me. If a project gets too complex or too expensive or too boring, I just move on to the next project. As they are also a learning journey I don't really care too much low long they take as long as I am learning something along the way and enjoying the effort. Being retired and kids grown and paying their own taxes helps also. I'm free to mismanage my time as I please.
As they say the journey is the reward and oh yea, no wine before its time. (how's that for management speak? )
Great advice everyone. I'm not used to using estimates and roughwork for deciding on answers to a problem. I always try to be scientific, even to a fault. It seems though that accomplishing worthwhile even slightly complicated things needs a little bit of personalisation and approximation. I was always suspicious of this kind of thing because I like to use my time efficiently, but by worrying about it I think I wasted more time. Oh, the poetic justice.
Anyway, thanks for the helpful advice everyone. You'd think I'd have picked this stuff up in college more but nope :-o And regarding GTD, I started trying to implement that system ages ago. I've taken to it with more gusto lately now that I've more time I want to tackle more projects and not spend a load of time freaking out about forgetting minor details like birthdays and washing myself
