Organisation is important

Just a quick one today. I just wanted to share some musings on how I'm planning to try and clear my hobby backlog.

I've decided I need to be more organised in the way in which I hobby. 

Some of you might remember that at the start of the year I pledged to get some fully painted armies finished by the end of 2019. It's a great goal to have and somewhat aided by my resolution to only game with fully painted models. 

The huge problem with that plan is that I'm a a massive hobby butterfly. The name of my blog should have tipped you off to that one. I go to sit down to work on a project and more often than not get distracted by something else which catches my attention. As a result I do a lot of hobby, but not much actually gets finished.

So how do I solve this? Well I listen to a lot of hobby podcasts and one of them came up with an idea which might actually work. Someone on the Independent Characters podcast mentioned using a workflow app to help track their hobby projects, listing all the stuff they have to do and moving them through the columns as they complete them.

I figured it's worth a try so I downloaded Trello onto my phone and made a list of all the hobby projects I've got to do and half finished projects which I know I have laying around:

Yes, there's a lot of them. That's not even half of my backlog!

I broke each project down broadly into building, painting and basing. I broke some of them down even further, depending on what they were. Some of them are silly little things which I never seem to ever get around to doing like 'stick Missile Launcher on my Dreadnought'. Others are as vague as 'paint this squad', but everything's on there. When they're done, I just need to move the task to the 'done' column.

The theory is that as long as I'm working on something on that list when I sit down to do hobby, I'm making progress on clearing my backlog, as well as giving me ome kind of visual reference point on how much progress I'm making beyond the painting points which I already do. It also forces me to think before I get distracted and start on something new.

Once I've ticked off 20-30 of these tasks, I plan treat myself by buying something new. By then I should have made enough positive progress that it'll be a net gain on my painting points.

I think it's a pretty solid idea, although there's really only one way to find out if it'll work.

 What do you reckon? How do you organise your hobby and stay on track with things?