dp.cx blog

I have more personal projects than I can realistically work on right now. A shoe rack out of plywood, a decorative fence to hide the air conditioner, low voltage landscape lighting, enclosing the patio under the back deck, smart home automation, software tools I've wanted to build for years. The list keeps growing, and very few things come off of it.

Some of these are straightforward - buy materials, spend a weekend, done. But a lot of them are tangled up in each other in ways that make it hard to start.

My woodworking tools are in a shed in the backyard. The shed needs a ramp so I can safely get things in and out. But before I build the ramp, I need to figure out what's going on around the base of the shed - the current plan is 12x12 cinder block pavers, but the back of the shed sits high enough that I'd need four or five pavers stacked, which doesn't really work. So the ramp waits on the pavers, the pavers need a better plan, and the shoe rack waits on the ramp because I can't get to the table saw. And that's just one dependency chain.

The landscape lighting is a different kind of blocked. Nobody is stopping me from buying the fixtures and running the wire, but I want to do it right - which means researching transformer sizing, wire gauge for the runs I'm planning, and how to set things up so I'm not re-doing it in two years. That research takes time and focus, and the cost isn't trivial, so I keep pushing it down the list in favor of things that feel more approachable.

The software projects are the easiest to start and the hardest to finish. There's no physical dependency chain, no materials to buy, no weather to work around. Just time and attention, which are the same resources every other project needs. I'll open an editor, make progress for an evening, and then not touch it for three weeks because something else grabbed my attention or a weekend opened up for yard work.

And then there's the stuff that isn't a project at all. I'd like to play video games sometimes. I'd like to actually relax on a weekend without a voice in the back of my head listing everything I could be making progress on instead. But that's the thing - every hour doing nothing productive is an hour the list stays the same length.

I don't think this is a discipline thing. I think it's that the number of things I want to do genuinely exceeds the time I have to do them, and a meaningful chunk of that list is blocked by things outside my control - or at least outside my immediate ability to resolve without first resolving something else. The projects compete with each other, and then they all compete with the non-project things I also want to do with my time.

I've tried the obvious approach - pick the one thing that unblocks the most other things and do that first. In theory, that's the shed pavers. In practice, I end up spending the weekend on something that's actually completable instead, because finishing something - anything - feels better than making partial progress on the thing that matters most.

I don't have a system for this. I have a list, and sometimes I open it and pick whatever I have the energy and materials for that day. Other times I open it and just stare at it. Fifteen or twenty things, most of them blocked or needing a full day I don't have. It's not that I can't decide - it's that looking at the whole pile at once makes it hard to start anything. So sometimes I just close the list and do nothing, which is its own kind of frustrating because the free time was there and I spent it being overwhelmed by the options.

I'm genuinely curious how other people handle this. If you've got a pile of personal projects - home improvement, software, hobbies, whatever - and some of them are blocked on each other or on things you can't control, how do you decide what to work on? Do you have a system, or is it vibes? Have you found something that actually works?