I've always been a listmaker. I use evernote to take ideas and things down. I make lists for everything and I keep a running weekly to do list for what needs to be done. I have it listed as Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. through weekend with an "other" underneath for things that should be scheduled in future weeks. On Sunday every week, I look at my upcoming week, my meetings, and my projects and try to balance my days. I've done this with every job and every project I've ever done.
To do lists for coding and development are way more difficult. I LOVE crossing things off of my to do list, and when your to do list involves coding projects, you are just less likely to cross stuff off your list, let alone be able to cross a bunch of things off your list. So, to help with this, I've also been making 6-8-week goal chunks. For example, at the beginning of August, my first set of goals included finishing a few specific tutorials, "building something", and making a decision about if, after the 6 week, I would continue working on my former startup or continue doing just development and stop working on that site (the "former" suggests what I decided to do).
I was super excited this time around because I accomplished almost all of my 8 week goals in just 5 weeks! These goals included establish a blog, post on the blog often (at a minimum twice per week), build something that teaches me some javascript and jQuery, shadow at a few companies, learn how to and then build a technical resume, and speak at a ruby meetup. The only goal currently not accomplished is get a job... so, I'm still working on that one. But, it looks like it's time to set some new goals and maybe think bigger for the next set.
