The Case For Your Own Project
May 6, 2010
You are currently working on two or three client projects, have some maintenance tasks, some business housekeeping, heck, you might even be employed full time by a soul-sucking corporation. You are tired, you deserve some time off and the last thing you want to do is start something new that will very likely never bring you any revenue. You are seriously wrong.
When you work on your own projects you are free to experiment, learn, and create. It’s okay to read some tutorials and get an idea of how something works, but it’s a completely different ball game when you actually apply that knowledge, not just to the simplified example task dictated by the learning material, but to your own ideas. You’ll run into unexpected challenges that will force you to push your limits and improve your skills.
Don’t just take my word for it, this is nothing new. Take a look at Google’s 20 percent time; it has yielded some of the companies most popular products: Gmail, Google Talk, Orkut, and a whole lot more. Of course, it’s easier when your employer is footing the bill for you to broaden your horizons, but you aren’t one to avoid a challenge, right?
Some things you can do could be one of those millions of ideas you had for a (Twitter/Facebook/iPhone/something) app, the revamping of your site you’ve been putting off for 3 years (HTML5 + CSS3 maybe), building premium themes and templates for sale, start a meet-up group. Are you a developer? Try experimenting with design, and vice versa. The possibilities are endless, the point is that you should stop thinking about it and start doing it. Take it seriously and it will likely grow beyond the little project you just started for fun.
I’m currently working on three side projects, and I make sure I keep track of them like I do with my “real” projects. It’s incredibly rewarding and hopefully some day they will become my “real” projects.
What are you working on? What do you want to learn? What’s stopping you from doing it?
