If you're feeling discouraged or like you're not making any progress, it might mean you're not scoping your projects correctly.

Whether it's #DevRel, side projects, or learning a new coding skill, knowing how to properly scope a project can feel like a superpower.

Ask yourself: "What's the smallest deliverable I can make that pushes me further towards my goal or dream?"

This could be a short blog post, a 30 second screencast, a small command line app, or part of a new app feature. It needs to be easy to know if it's finished or not.

Adjust the size of that deliverable according to what you can get done in roughly a few days of work.

This isn't a hard & fast rule, but the goal is to keep it under a week so you can build momentum.

Tip: If you don't know how much work you can accomplish in a few days, block off 90 minutes in your calendar to do some deep focused work in that area. That'll give you a frame of reference for what you can or can't do in a few sessions like that.

As you think about scoping for a few days of work, optimize for quality over quantity.

Factor in time you might need for things like publishing, marketing, deployment, cross-posting, etc.

There's great benefit to thoughtfully running through a whole process.

Make the project 10% more difficult than you're comfortable with.

You want it to push you to learn something new without completely paralyzing you.

As you build more skill and experience, you'll be able to scale the amount you can ship in a few days.

You'll get better at the creative side and you'll also get better at building systems around the steps that are time-consuming in the beginning.

What about bigger initiatives?

Of course not everything can neatly fit into a few days or a week, but the more you can practice slicing off tiny chunks to work through quickly and measure, the better you can adjust course throughout a big project.

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