When you get nothing done.

I just saw this meme yesterday and felt kinda depressed instantly. Because it’s exactly how I feel at the moment.

As the project leader of InvoicePlane (an open source, self hosted billing application) I wanted to make the project big and I already achieved a lot of goals.
At the moment the application is used by more than 5000 companies and freelancers in 130 countries all around the world. But the problem is that the InvoicePlane was written by someone else and some parts of it doesn’t work like I want them to work. So, as a Laravel fan I thought it would be a good idea to rewrite the app from scratch so I could implement all features that are currently missing but needed. Last year I decided to start working on InvoicePlane 2.

Think first, act later

The biggest mistake while developing InvoicePlane 2 was that I just started without even knowing the way. I just set up Laravel, configured the repositories and started to work on the installation for the app including the database structure. But just a few weeks later I realised that so much things are inapplicable, a lot of database fields didn’t matched and then I asked myself an important question: “What do we need actually?”
and then the problems started to grow.
This was about two months ago. I didn’t worked much on the app since then, didn’t wrote any code. I just tried to sort out all database issues and thought about how to start. At the moment I’m overwhelmed by the mass of tasks that needs to be done. And most of them require a lot of free time to think about certain things. Not actually doing anything, just thinking of how to solve certain problems or how to implement requested features. But I’m working full time so I just have limited time to spend and then there is the current version of InvoicePlane, the community forums and the website that require my attention. And this situation is the basic problem of my “get nothing done” crysis. I’m sitting in the train home, the MacBook in front of me with the InvoicePlane issue tracker opened — and I do nothing. Sitting there for half an hour just thinking about where and how to start. It’s so frustrating that I already thought about stoping the development on InvoicePlane 2.

Capitulation is not on option

I have goals and I want to achieve them. InvoicePlane should be one of the big accounting / billing / invoicing applications known everywhere and used all around the globe by more than “just” 5000 companies or freelancers.
That’s why capitulation is not an option. But I have to think about priorities first. So what’s the plan? Where to start? The same questions I asked myself two months ago.
After writing this post I feel a little bit better. Not depressed or overwhelmed anymore. The first step should be to simply write down all needed features and where they belong to. The it-should-have-the-same-features-like-the-previous-version thing is just stupid and will lead to missing features or compatibility issues. Then I can go ahead and start linking them all together.
I may not be able to provide an early alpha version of the app in spring 2016 but I’ll do my very best.

PS: You now know that InvoicePlane 2 needs help.
Are you a web developer with some experience with Laravel?
Are you a project manager who could help structuring the project?
Are you a software developer who could help with the basic planning?
Or do you know somebody of the ones mentioned above?
Then please take a look at this announcement.