Hobby Sprints – The 2024 Plan

At this time last year, I did some deep soul searching about how to get out of a bit of a hobby rut and get more done.  This involved taking a good look in the mirror, understanding my motivations, and re-thinking how I would approach my hobby.  I set this out in a project here.

Key to that plan was giving myself a simple goal of hobbying on as many days as possible. No rules about amount of time on each day, nor any specific output goals.

The result was that I hobbied on 145 days.  I only counted working on miniatures, not preparing for games, playing games or updating projects etc.  Sounds quite impressive, that’s basically hobby every other day, but if I am honest the overall output didn’t increase from the previous year.

Part of the reason for the output was that I had some large armies that I was working on.  I put quite a bit of work into them, but the projects were nowhere near finished.  So I shouldn’t feel too bad about that.  But on the flip side, the large armies are a bit of a slog and I think motivation suffered as a result.  I didn’t really leverage my “hobby sampler” approach that I said I needed at the start of the year.

So, not a bad year by any means, but not revolutionary.

Whilst mulling over how I could evolve my plan for 2024, I had an idea.  Stealing from “Agile” project management methodology, I thought about approaching the year as a series of “sprints”.

Each month, at the start of the month, I will decide which project I am going to focus on for that month.  No long term pre-planning, I will allow myself to decide what I am motivated to work on, and then work on that for the month.  I will set some achievable goals and if it all goes well can do some other things as well.  This will allow me to be agile throughout the year to changing external motivations (OTT challenges, or new game released or whatever) and cycle through my projects to maintain variety.

I put a template together to help me to plan, and filled it out for January.  The project I am currently most motivated to work on is CodeBlade, I am really excited to test out the rules with more factions and so I have given myself January to do just that!  It’s quite liberating to think that I can choose a new project for February, and gives me motivation to achieve those January goals.

I have looked ahead a few months, not so much to pre-plan those months, but to understand what the external influences might be that could inform what I might be motivated by.  It is comforting to know that other projects will likely be coming up the pecking order as things like TV series, or OTT challenges come around.  I can start to think about what I MIGHT want to do, but will leave the decision to that month.

Let’s see how it goes!

Goal 1 ticked off!

Goal 2 achieved on 14th Jan!

Goal 3 achieved on 16th Jan!

Battle Report and Game Overview

With the “sprint” achieved on 16th January, I’m happy. In hindsight it perhaps wasn’t the most stretching set of goals,  but I did put some significant time into it. More than I put into some months last year. I’m not complacent though, new year new motivation, we need to see how it holds up throughout the year!

Having completed the January Sprint, I even had the urge to immediately put a couple of hours into a different project – a project that had gone a bit off the boil. Very pleased with that!

With January’s sprint being successful, the 1st Feb brings about decisions re this months goals.  Having decided quite late on that I would get amongst the Dungeonalia action, February will definitely be a sprint to get it over the line.  It will be more playing and writing than working on miniatures, but hopefully I can do some of that too.

February is over, and all goals were complete.  This month was an interesting one. I thought I’d gone easy on myself at the start of the month.  It was a relatively late decision to enter a Dungeonalia project, with 5 weeks to do it, but I thought that what I had given myself to do might prove to be a bit easy.  How wrong I was!  Turns out that the scenario I played was pretty epic, and writing is HARD!  Towards the end of the month I was starting to get worried and really had to put the hours in to get it finished.  It really was a sprint finish!

Feels good to have it done though.  The completed project, Fallout: Escape from Vault 99, is here.

After two quite intense months, I am going to allow a change of pace for March.  Jan and Feb were really productive gaming and writing-wise but not so much in the way of miniature painting.  So this month I am going to push on with my Necron Limorekh Dynasty.

I am at about 1165 points painted so far, so I am going to push on towards 2000.

A macro influence this month is the  ‘Spring Clean Challenge’, so I am going to let that sit and simmer while I paint my Necrons and see what inspiration strikes.  Given how long these Necrons have gone unfinished, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to call this a Spring Clean project, but there are older and fouler things than Necrons that dwell in the deep places of my pile of opportunity!

March was a good month.  Despite deliberately going soft on myself because I knew it would be a difficult month to achieve a stretch target, I made good progress on the Necrons.  While I was on holiday I read Tommie Soule’s book which was really educational and re-taught me how to use a paintbrush!  So I’ve enjoyed just exploring that while cracking on with some of the more mundane stages of the paint job, like making the bases brown.  Observing how my brush holds water and paint, and unloads them together has made that task more interesting.

In fact, I enjoyed it so much that in April I will carry on and aim to get to the 2000 point mark, fully painted!

March was also a good month because the project that I spent so much time on in February won its category in the Dungeonalia contest!  I was delighted with that outcome in addition to the main goal which was officially kicking off my Fallout campaign!

April’s target is to get the Necrons to 2000 points, fully painted.  With the current points values I had a gap which will allow me to add a Doomstalker to the army.  So I will need to build that and get it caught up to the other models!

I will also continue to ponder Spring Clean Challenge and if/what to do!

Interesting experiment, got some stuff done, learned some things, but the project management style isn’t for me!