Between the day your child is born, and the time he or she turns 18, you get 940 Saturdays. That’s It.
Time is a very sacred resource that every human on the planet has a limit of. You cannot buy more time no matter how rich you are. You do not get a redo on what you have spent your time on, no matter how smart you are.
I want to always ensure that I am spending my time here on the most important stuff to me. I want to ensure that I can utilize my time in such a way that I can take advantage of the time I have with my family. Time has always been the thing that I want to optimize. It’s the only resource we can’t renew.
I do not always spend my time wisely. I wanted to build a system that would help me do that, guide me along the way, and tell me how I did so I can improve.
The Idea
The idea behind Pipeline is simple. Plan your week by assigning buckets of hours to certain projects that are important to you. Each day you can then let Pipeline know how many hours you have spent on each project.
Pipeline will collect those hours and guide you throughout the week. It will say things like Great job on Project X! and You should probably get started on Project Y.. This will help guide you through your week and
at the end of the week, you will get a report of how you did so you can help plan the next week. If you already track your time using Freshbooks or Harvest then the
tracking part should come for free. I plan on adding more 3rd party time trackers as time goes on.
Why this project?
I have spent a lot of my time during the last few years working on side projects that I have abandoned. Projects that I lost interest on or I was too late with. I have even recently abondoned a project about 2 weeks ago before I started Pipeline.
I have had the idea for Pipeline a few years ago but I never knew if it would work for me. To be honest, I still don’t. I did however run an experiment for a couple of weeks by mimicing Pipeline on pen and paper and it was extremely helpful. I was more focused and I eliminated the stuff that did not help me reach my end goals. So I am going forward with it.
Amir Rajan has been a big influence on me sharing my experiences. Reading about his Dark Room experience really influenced this. I am sharing my experiences in this blog along the way for a few reasons.
- To help me be accountable and stay on track
- To share my source code with anyone that is interested. That may be clients, customers, or other developers.
- To hopefully generate buzz and awareness for the project before it gets released.
When
My goal is to launch a web application and an iPhone application by May 2014. I am dedicating at least 25 hours per week to this project. It will be tough. I plan on doing all the design and development of both of the applications. I will only release quality stuff.
The application will be a SaSS application that I will charge for at the end. I plan on keeping the code open source. People will be able to clone and run their own Pipeline instances on their own if they wish. I will accept pull requests if the feature is aligned with the overall goals for pipeline.
I hope you follow along on my journey. If you would rather get notifications of new posts you can subscribe to the RSS feed or sign up for the newsletter. Newsletter subscribers will get a few extra bonuses such as early invites, discounts when Pipeline is launched, revenue stats, and influence with some of the design and development of the application.
Wish me luck.