Regular readers of my blog will know that I have lot of pet projects. WordPress Plugins, Android Apps, Arduino projects, jQuery Plugins and a whole variety of other hobbies as well.
Some of them are really popular. For instance my Bulk Delete WordPress Plugin has been downloaded for nearly 100,000 times. The flip side of it is that these pet projects have some additional baggage as well. Support questions, regular updates, feature requests etc can be sometimes very time consuming.
I always wanted to know the projects, which takes up most of my free time, but didn’t had any metrics or logs. So I have started to track the amount of time I am spending on each of these projects.
The advantage of this is that, now I know which project are real time hogs and can have some metrics to decide on whether it is worth spending time on those projects or not. I am also going to add this data to the project readme files, so that people who use it might also know the amount of time and effort I have put it on those projects 🙂
I have already started this and the recent release of my Bulk Delete WordPress Plugin had this metrics. I have spent close to 11 hours for releasing the update to the Plugin.
Let’s see how this new experiment turns out to be.
BTW do you guys also track your time spent on pet projects? If yes, then share your experiences as well.