Project wishlist overload

Here’s something I struggle with a lot and I’m willing to bet there’s a ton of people out there like me.

Say you have an idea for a website that’s going to give people the opportunity to perform a list of cool things. Obviously when you look at that list of cool things, your brain starts getting overwhelmed with the amount of work you need to do to get each thing working. If you’re like me, you start jumbling them all up and seem to be trying to focus on all of them at once.

The right way to handle this is with a simple priority list. If your site should do X, Y, and Z; you need to figure out which of those is the main focus or the most important. Say Z is the biggest thing that you are pushing and X and Y are just nice features. Then you should push X and Y out of your mind and start focusing on Z.

With Z as your focus, you get that working properly, test it out, and then add in X or Y but never both. Attacking one problem at a time and purposely pushing the other problems out of your mind as you do so will help you actually make progress. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve let a list of ideas overwhelm me to the point of leaving the project on the table and walking away.

My goal with my current web project is to use this method. We’ll see how far that gets.