At the beginning of this process, I did a lot of organizing and planning to make sure I had a solid list of tasks I needed to perform.  It was great to have a big, prioritized list where I could check things off and see my progress.  As I web through the list, there were tasks here and there that I ended up skipping, usually because I was blocked on completing the task by some dependency or because I couldn’t complete the task on my mobile phone and moved on to something I could do on my mobile phone.  As a reminder, I am doing most of the work for the startups and this blog from my mobile phone, as it allows me freedom to work on most tasks just about anywhere, and I spend an hour to and from my day job on a train where I don’t often have enough space to pull out a laptop.

At this point, coming off of a weeklong vacation where I did almost no work other than “figure out what part of the beach I wanted to snorkel from,” I’ve decided to take some time and reorganize my tasks and go back through my original plan to find things I’ve missed or need to revisit.  I do this in my day job once a quarter as well.  It’s a good opportunity to reflect on work accomplished, lessons learned, and what I missed that needs to be reprioritized.

I’ve managed to get quite a bit done in the last four months, considering I’m working on this in my “spare time.”  Lots of admin tasks, foundation for the physical card game underway, all of the art planned, and started with the tech company that’s first project is a fitness app.  There are also things that fell through the cracks.  I haven’t gotten the tax id set up yet, and still need to set up a bank account.  Some web assets need some cleanup as well.

By looking at what I’ve been able to get done in the last four months, I can see the “velocity” of my work that I’m doing.  Velocity can be depicted in different ways – I choose to look at the number of hours I’ve put into the Startup divided by the number of tasks I’ve checked off my list.  While this isn’t super scientific, it’s simple and gives me some kind of gauge on how fast I’m progressing.  I can use this velocity to look at my future tasks and predict when future work should be finished.  I need to be sure that the tasks I’ve completed aren’t vastly different than the tasks in the future: if I’ve completed all the quick easy tasks over the last 4 months and have all of the long, difficult tasks left, this won’t paint an accurate picture.

Overall I’m happy that I’ve made progress, but I’m not progressing as fast as I’d like to.  I’ve got a few life obstacles to get out of the way and that should give me more time to work on the startups.  The biggest thing I am doing is moving to a new house.  This house is a bit smaller, with a smaller yard and a lot less “greenery” which means I will have more time during the weekends as I won’t need to spend as much time in the yard maintaining it.

How is your velocity shaping up for what you’re working on?  What steps are you taking to improve your velocity?