Working on pet projects can be mentally rewarding, but clutter management is absolutely key in my opinion.

Monday morning, you wake up at 6am raring to go. You spend two hours writing code and another hour writing a blog post. Then 9am comes along. Work time!

Before you know it, 6pm hits you violently in the face with a shout from downstairs “Dinner is ready!”, which means it isn’t ready, but it’s time to get the little ones ready for dinner time and the dog taking you for a walk. Then it’s kiddo bed time with your best impressions from whatever book of the week is favourite and with a nod of permission, you go back to your cave and open your personal machine. What you see is evidence of hitting flow at 6:30am and a trail of applications, with some half working code that thew an error at 8:45am.

With great power comes…great opportunity to have ten desktops open with 50GB of memory consumed as you move between various day tasks.

Operation Clean Slate

I’ve recently gotten into the habit of “operation clean slate”, which means shutting down everything at the point of context switching and making sure Git pushes are done, backups are made and your brain is dumped into Confluence, Notion or whatever else you use. Not only is your brain free to context switch at maximum energy, the ceremony of opening applications, IDEs and terminal screens, helps with achieving flow, and it means you’re free to pick and choose what you want to work on without a prior run sucking you back in.

What do you do? Do you have a habit to share?

Built.fm

Reaching Flow on Pet Projects