A side project can be your hobby, passion, or part-time business. It’s a chance to use your creativity, learn new skills, and even make some money along the way doing something you generally love.
The key to making side projects successful is setting clear goals, developing a strategy, and taking action. This guide will walk you through the steps you need to set yourself up for success.
1. Have An End-Goal
Have an end goal. If you’re going to take on the challenge of a side project, you need to have an end goal in mind. This goal should tie into a larger aim — perhaps it’s to eventually launch a professional business or land a job at a company you love. You have to lay out a clear objective you aspire to reach so that you don’t end up changing your original plan too much and wandering down different avenues. Eventually, you forget what it was that you set out to accomplish in the first place.
You should create a clear mission statement at the beginning of your project to have specific goals and effectively plan how you will accomplish them. It will also remind yourself why you set out on this new challenge in the first place.
2. Organize your Time
Once you have an idea and an end goal laid out, you have to commit yourself to see it through to completion. We all know there are never enough hours in the day to make time for extra work, but with a bit of time management, you can give yourself small goals to complete each day that will pile up in the long run.
This is why it is crucial to create and maintain a schedule to map out how much time you will spend on this project every day so that you don’t lose your rhythm or focus. It’s easy to keep procrastinating and to put things off, telling yourself, “I can move this to next week.” Weeks can quickly turn into months, and before you know it, you’ll find yourself completely off course and fall behind.
3. Create Your Dream Team
People tend not to have a lot of time to delegate to the projects they would love to work on. So why not add valuable members to your team to designate work and be genuinely more effective!
Once you’ve found a motivated group of people, be sure to keep each other going with support and encouragement. Create incentives and utilize positive reinforcement to inspire and motivate your colleagues to take things a step further.
4. Track Metrics
The most crucial part of any project is the revision process. The goal here is to improve constantly. Either it’s looking into retention insights of your software or seeing what recommendations your audience wants to be improved, take control of the situation, and see what you can learn from it.
5. Don’t Be Afraid to Overreach
Our motto at Prajix is, “Those who are crazy enough to believe they can change the world are the ones who do.” We remind ourselves of this every day not only to push ourselves to be the best we can be but because nothing would have ever gotten done in this world if there weren’t dreamers aiming to do the impossible. The only thing standing in the way of you and your dreams is the myth that they are unattainable.
If you’re not going to put forth your best effort, then what’s the point of embarking on a new challenge in the first place? In life, failure is inevitable, but it is also our best teacher.