The word “project” tends to sound like work. Deadlines, meetings, plans, somebody asking when it’ll be finished.
But projects are everywhere in our lives. We just don’t always call them that.
Renovating a bathroom is a project. So is planning a trip or researching your family history. A hobby can turn into one without you really noticing. Even something like maintaining a car can collect enough information over the years that it starts making sense to keep it all together.
Some projects last a weekend. Others follow us around for years. They don’t necessarily have a deadline, and they don’t always end with something being finished.
Sometimes they’re simply things we keep adding to.
Projects tend to grow
A lot of projects start with very little.
You save a few photos or find some useful information online. There’s a document you want to keep or something you need to remember.
Then more gathers around it.
Your car is a good everyday example. Over a few years you can end up with oil change records, repair invoices, tire information and warranty paperwork. There’s a reason so much of that traditionally ends up in the glove box.
It all belongs to the car.
Most of the time you’re not actively doing anything with it. Then something needs repairing and suddenly knowing what was replaced three years ago is useful.
Other projects grow because you’re actively working on them.
You might get into woodworking and start by saving a few plans. Eventually you decide to build something yourself. Now you’ve got measurements you changed, a reference photo and a link to hardware you haven’t ordered yet. You make a note about something you’d do differently next time.
Then summer gets busy and you leave it alone until January.
When you come back, you’re not starting from scratch. There’s already a history there.
Some projects are really about the history
Family archives are a good example.
You might begin with a box of photographs. Then someone recognizes a person in one of them and tells you who it is. You learn where the photograph was taken. A relative remembers something about that day.
Later, another piece turns up that connects to it.
The photographs are still important, but now there’s something around them that wasn’t there before. Names, dates, stories and connections have started building a history.
There may never be a point when that project is finished. In fact, finishing it might not even be the point.
You’re preserving something and adding to it when you can.
More of that history is becoming digital
We’ve organized parts of our lives like this for a long time.
Photo albums kept family pictures together. Recipe boxes collected things we wanted to make again. Filing cabinets held important paperwork. Manuals got thrown into drawers, and receipts were tucked somewhere we hoped we’d remember.
What’s changing is that more of the information around our physical lives is becoming digital.
Buy an appliance today and the receipt might arrive by email. The manual could only be available online. Your warranty confirmation is a PDF. If something breaks, you take a picture of the model number and look up the replacement part on your phone.
The appliance is physical. Most of its useful information isn’t.
Collections work the same way. You can have a shelf full of physical objects while keeping photographs, purchase records, research and other details about them digitally.
Even a garden can leave a digital trail. Photos from last summer, the variety of tomato that actually did well, a planting plan you made and the website where you found those seeds.
Having a digital record of something doesn’t make the physical part less important. It gives you somewhere to keep the information that’s accumulating around it.
A project doesn’t have to look like a project
That’s probably the biggest distinction.
We’re used to recognizing certain things as projects because somebody gave them a name. The kitchen renovation is a project. The presentation at work is a project.
Plenty of others never get labelled.
They’re just things we do.
We maintain them, research them, collect things for them, put them away and come back later. They can build a history without us ever deciding that we’re officially starting a project.
And they don’t need to become complicated just because we decide to organize them that way.
The useful part is being able to come back and understand what you’ve already collected, learned or done.
Where Homescreen fits
That way of looking at projects is a big part of why we built Homescreen.
Homescreen gives a project its own place on compatible external storage, where files can live alongside the notes, links and other information you’ve collected around them.
That project could be something you’re working on this week, something you maintain over the years or something that sits untouched until you’re ready to pick it up again.
Because projects aren’t confined to offices, businesses or work.
A lot of them are simply the things we care enough about to keep.
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