Time shared development.

Good or Bad Idea to shared your development time between projects?

For some time I had no topic to share with you, I'm sorry.

Like most other developers, I have not only one project to do. Of course, there are two or three main projects to handle, but what's about the side project I have to or like to do?

In the past I stopped the development of my main projects and switched the focus to project E. After finishing E in a short time, I came back to A, B, and C. That was fine for a long time.

Sometimes if I got stocked in my development I put project E on holt, to get back to ABC. If the amount of time was too long, I started by zero if I tried to resume project E, in other words: To get back into E it takes too much time.

If I worked for many months on project B - life got boring. So what could I change?

Imagine you like to do a lot of different things - some will earn you money, some will help you with the future project and some are just for fun or you want to try some new stuff.

So with the main projects A, B and C you start 4 more or even interesting projects D-G. at this point, you have 7 active projects one for every day of the week (if you work 7/days/week). ;-)

So every day I decide what's the topic for today between A-G. Nice! Every day a new task to do. Sometimes the same for two or three days in a row, but then resume another project.

This was a nice idea and improved my work a lot.

There is - of course - a backside of the medal: Projects that normally takes 3 months now takes 12! That's the only drawback you have to deal with... It feels like you are not getting any progress because no project get's finished or even shipping state.

So do scrump with no team? Perhaps some kind of project Gantt graph thing, to see progress in all your projects… If I find good software, I like to try this.

Or add project H for that topic to my list… ;-)