Ask HN: How do you manage your one-man project?

I try to take what I got from University. It's nothing new or special, but it helps me get along. I generally stick with a rapid-prototype design and follow through the (collective "ugh") waterfall approach. Start with your requirements, formulate an analysis, follow through with a a design and work towards the implementation and testing with focus on post-delivery maintenance. It's not new, and it's not in any way "productivity porn". But, for me it works and that's all that really matters.

Tools I use: I try to stick with an IDE like Eclipse. I know they're sorta frowned upon, but I like convenience. I use Git, personal preference. Some spreadsheet program for managing tabular data, like milestones, word processor for keeping a journal, and a scratch pad or whiteboard for scratch-work.

Tips I've accumulated after a while:

   * Milestones help you focus your efforts for the "session"
   * Design documents and whatnot sound like a lot of paperwork, and it is, but they are incredibly useful to have and keep around.
   * Try to not intermix phases of development. Don't do design and requirements gathering or design and analysis at the same time. Do things in order. It keeps things clean and separated.

Nothing here is incredibly new and much of it is probably incredibly obvious to most people, but as a person who studied computer science, software engineering concepts were not stressed. This methodology keeps me going without getting stuck in "programmers block" wondering what-to-do-next.

I often do the same thing as you, where I get up early (6ish for me) and do a couple hours of work before the start of the actual workday.

The most important part to me is to make sure that I'm only doing things that actually matter. So when I'm thinking about adding a feature to my product, I first try to see if that feature should actually be the highest-priority thing, or if my customers can live without it. And it helps to zoom way out, too. Often, programming is not the wisest way for me to spend my time. Sometimes it makes a lot more sense to spend time on, say, marketing, or on education, whether that be programming-related education or something else. Abraham Lincoln said, "If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my ax." A lot of the time, sharpening your ax is the most effective use of your limited time.

I've found the following books helpful when it comes to time management and overall effectiveness. In order of how strongly I recommend them:

- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey

- First Things First by Stephen R. Covey

- Getting Things Done by David Allen

- The first 20 pages or so of The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes

I use a combination of tactics recommended by GTD, FTF and T7HOHEP. After reading GTD, I wrote down everything I could think of that I would have to or want to do, ever. Examples: do the dishes, email Steve, visit Europe. Later, I captured most of these items in Evernote, and then later, I graduated to Things. I suspect that the developers of Things have read GTD.

Now that I have all of my to-dos captured in Things, I try to take one day each week (usually Monday) to plan the rest of the week. Reality never matches up with the plan, but I don't think that means I need to throw out the entire process. It's still helpful to have at least a high-level idea of what I want to do with the week.

I still find Evernote valuable for capturing ideas, but Things seems best so far for capturing to-dos. I also still use pen and paper to plan on a day-to-day basis. If I go by Things only, I forget, so I usually transfer my daily Things to-dos to paper at the beginning of the day. As unexpected things naturally pop up throughout the day, I add them to my daily to-do list and/or Things, depending on how likely I think it is I'll get to that item the same day.

Hope that stuff helps.

Beyond workflowy, before going to bed each night have the next 2-3 things you need to do immediately when waking up ready and defined.

That way, when you wake up, you can dive right into it and try to accomplish at least one thing a morning, if not two. This helps you get up rested and put your highest and best energy into your side project and it can be fruitful.

Make.Progress.Every.Day.

I've found that the first 80% I can generally get done pretty quickly; most of the design and architecture is in my head and always running as a background task. I use Evernote to organize TODO's (always at the top of the list), and have little discussions with myself about stuff like features, UI's etc.

Life.Gets.In.The.Way.Restart. Arrrrgh. Inevitably. Back to Evernote and pick up where I left off. It gets much harder during that last 20% (which usually takes me more than that first 80%), because the jump from Proof of Concept to Product is brutal.

Do.The.Worst.First. A friend of mine, Sid the Sailor, used to talk about "painting the windowsills when the whole house needed cleaning"... especially combined with that last 20%, I have a tendency to go down rabbitholes (hey maybe I'll use RabbitMQ for this)... so, back to Evernote, and add the TODAY list - what's most important to get done. Then, suck it up, and do it. These often require very long late night sessions since it can often take hours for me to get started and get the momentum up to deal with the pile of poo. (Cause if it was fun it woulda been done).

Invite.Others.to.the.Party During the process, unless it's Top Secret(tm), invite others to take a look at what you're doing. Early on it's nice to get some approval, later on, it's nice to get some feedback about usability. Be careful to avoid party poopers since you don't need to be discouraged - this shit is hard enough already.

Launch.the.fucker. I have trouble with this one, because it's scary. It also generally means I'm going to end up with a pile of feedback (or bug reports) from a bunch of pissed off strangers. I really don't like it because it means work, and lots of it. It's the chasm between a brain fart and reality. And I get faced with the ultimate reality of "Hey maybe this sucks and I've just wasted a huge amount of time".

Now, in "practice what I preach mode", you might want to check out xlogs - http://xlo.gs - it provides logfiles for Amazon AWS and more. and i'm just launching it now :)

I use the free community version of rallydev to manage all my stories and defects. It's definitely a fully featured agile project management tool and may be more UI than you are looking for. I have found it useful because I can clearly track progress, involve friends if need be and have one place for everything.