Small Projects

This post on small projects has been in my mind for several years. It’s worth a read! I like the idea that it can be both more productive and more effective to work on creating small things rather than undertaking massive endeavours. For example, I see Viva Survivors as a series of small projects under one umbrella, rather than one big behemoth.

I’ve been casting my mind around for a while on other small projects for the site, and at the time of writing have the following in my to-do queue:

• Add tags and keywords to every post from the daily blog.
• Curate a few lists of posts on similar themes.
• Produce pages for each of the books that I have available (rather than only a single hub page).
• Produce a new season of the podcast, approx 8 episodes that become available at the same time, like an album!
• Create a few more Pocketmod tiny books, and several more minicast episodes.

Small projects are manageable. Even if you don’t have time to work on something immediately, you can see most of the parts and see where the challenges are. It’s the opposite of most research projects, where often you can’t appreciate everything until you’re already in it.

Viva prep can be a series of small projects, and none of them have to be over-taxing to complete. Reading your thesis and marking it up in a useful way is a small project. Creating summaries to draw out your thoughts is a couple of small projects. A mock viva or presentation to give you opportunity to think and talk is a small project. It all helps.

For your thesis, you had to think big. Maybe for your viva prep it’s useful to think small.