Over the past five years, I've sort of reinvented myself though side projects all while staying quite professionally productive. I wrote a little about my project process almost a year ago and thought I'd repost it here in case any one else finds it helpful:

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(From early 2018 [1])

My driving force is to create things and that directs how I go about personal projects. I don't have much in the way of an official process, but the typical project cycle goes something like:

1. Start with any idea or question that is most interesting to me right now, for example: converting audio propaganda to waveforms.

I usually try to align the project with some longer term personal goal. One of my current longer term goals for example is to start a business. To do that, I want to become better at selling things. Therefore, my current medium term project is to try selling letterpress prints of the waveforms from propaganda.

2. Research the idea, start learning required skills, and begin prototyping. Often—as in the letterpress project—I go in with no idea what I am doing. I always try to keep my specific goal in mind and make sure I am delivering something, either as learning or as actual prototypes. I'm also trying to become better at collaborating with other people on this and outsourcing the work here (which is itself another longer term goal)

This stage usually spawns a number of new ideas that I add to a personal backlog. If one of these is more interesting than what I am currently working on, I change the project's focus or abandon it altogether.

3. Polish, release, and share. If the project is still interesting, continue iterating. Otherwise, go back to step 1 and repeat.

I try to keep this cycle short but that isn't always practical, so I compensate by having multiple project going on at the same time. These roughly fall into a few different timescales: one-off (a few hours in one go), short (1 or 2 weeks freetime), medium (a month or so with interruptions), and long (3 months+ of very off-and-on work).

This process has let me create, explore, and learn quite a bit without getting burned out. It has also taken me in directions I never expected.

I don't know any of this would work more broadly. Again, my driving force is to just to create things. I'm operating in a bit of a vacuum with no real audience in mind or much in the way of external pressures.

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Main takeaways:

- Side projects should be for you.

- Mix short and long term deliverables and goals.

- Have variety and continually iterate to avoid burn out.

Since writing the above in early 2018, I actually did learn letterpress in order to complete the propaganda waveform project[2], which itself led to me traveling to Switzerland for a letterpress poster design class, which led to all sorts of adventures in Switzerland and Italy and tons of new project ideas. I'm also continuing to explore selling more (including selling printed posters)

Again, this general mode of working has let me explore a large number of side projects while doing good work in my day job. There is really nothing special to it. However side projects have been incredibly important to me and I hope these points may be useful to someone else too

[1]: https://github.com/mattbierner/blog.mattbierner.com/issues/1...

[2]: https://blog.mattbierner.com/anwar-wave/