Project Bankruptcy

Most engineers, and probably most people in general, will be familiar with how projects and tasks accumulate. Finishing university and moving three times in two months has pushed my todo list past the end of the page. I sat down today and wrote down everything I could think of that I wished, or was obliged, to accomplish in the next month and have to admit that some (many) of the project ideas that float through my head simply aren’t going to get done.

I already did a cull of the project list in May when I was packing to move out of my apartment in Mountain View. I’m happy to say that my workbench did see a lot of use over the last year and that many projects did get finished. However almost an equal number stalled out for lack of a part, a gap in my knowledge which turned into a rabbit hole spawning new projects, or simply because there are only so many hours in a day. So nearly all of the physical items attached to zombie projects were given away or recycled. Now the time has come to reap the list again and start fresh (mostly).

I’m declaring Project Bankruptcy, inspired by Email Bankruptcy. Unless I have made an explicit commitment to complete a task or have a continuing duty to support a system, its all being dropped. Some of the dropped projects will bounce right back onto my list because of their immediate relevance (such as figuring out the dynamic dns settings of our new router) and that’s fine. But so many of these projects and tasks are no longer (or never were) important and are just mental cruft.

One of the few visible changes as a result of this will be the clearing out of past, partially completed posts on this blog and the removal of a number of public repositories that aren’t relevant to anyone. Sorry if anyone misses something.