david a mcclain (blog) | Home

I have a lot of personal projects I want to work on. I keep a list (and bare in mind that some of these ideas might be gargantuan projects, some might be small “do in a weekend” type projects) and right now I have about 35 things I wish I could work on. Sometimes it feel like I’ll never make a dent in this ever growing list of to-dos, and sometimes I feel like I’ll never figure out what I want to spend my time on.So I came across this mini-interview with Jim Coudal on Life in Perpetual Beta. (I really like the way Jim’s brain is wired - I hope he donates it to science in his Will) and paraphrasing slightly he said that when he’s looking at a new project he asks himself three questions…

1. Am I going to make money from this?
2. Is this going to be something I’m proud of when it’s done? Am I going to want to show this to my friends?
3. Am I going to learn something from doing it?

Watch the interview here.And this just struck me as a perfect little philosophy. Although (rightly or wrongly) I may perhaps let the first question slip from time to time.