Two years ago I was doing a project management course, the University where I studied gave us a very useful spreadsheet that allowed you to enter your weekly commitments (day job, hobbies, physiological needs, etc, etc) and the spreadsheet would work out how much time you’ve got left to study.
Well that the exact thing I needed, but now I need to analyze the time I can commit to my Micro ISV venture, like many of you guys I do have a day job to feed the family and pay for the bills, I work as a Freelance developer so this give me a bit more flexibility (I’m not always fully booked with projects ) and time (I rarely commute these days and can do all my development work remotely) compared to someone who need to sit in a cubile for 8 hours and has a 3 hours commute a day, I consider myself lucky having being able to escape the cubicle nation
I also delegate most of the admin stuffs(sales quotes, invoices, payment reminders, communication with our accountant) to my wife, since those are really time consuming tasks where I don’t bring any added value.
This little exercise allowed me to visualize that I have roughly 48 hours available free per week, I will round down this number to 25 hours (Yes I’m a very conservative person!). So 25 hours a week is really the minimum I should commit to my Micro ISV project.
Find below my weekly schedule, it’s not super precise but it give me a good idea of where my time is going :
The time weekly chart give me a good view on where my time is going :
Once you’ve finnished this little exercise you will know approximatively how much time you’ve got left for creating your software product, or more generally any other activies you would like to fit into your hopefully busy life
On various forums like BOS, there’s often that recurring question “How much time do you guys spend on you software product ?”, but often the real question behind this query come really down to “How much time can I devote to work on my software product ?”
If you want to check how a Micro ISV project can fit with you current commitments,You can grab the Microsoft spread sheet over here (I could not save an XLS file into wordpress, so I changed the extension of the file to .DOC, make sur to modify the extension again to XLS before opening the file)
Now let’s see if I can commit to my 25 hours a week (100 hours/month or 1200 hours/years) Micro ISV schedule without negatively impacting my family and my freelance contracts …
Mental Procreation 