How To Start a Personal Project
Gain the experience needed to land your next job by creating your own side projects.
It’s a catch-22: how to gain work experience without having any experience. This paradox plagues all types of professionals, from recent graduates to those trying to pivot into a new industry or get promoted.
You might think the only way to overcome it is to be highly qualified or just lucky. But in fact, you can create your own qualifications or luck — and eventually land that new opportunity — through personal projects.
What is a personal project?
A personal project (or side project) is a self-initiated, creative undertaking usually for the purposes of self-expression, skill development, or personal fulfillment. Creative growth is at the heart of personal projects, which is what makes them so worthwhile.
Personal projects can be done by yourself or in collaboration with others, about any subject and in any medium. A personal project could be a series of illustrations, or a blog where you publish your writing (like this Substack). The possibilities for personal projects are infinite; conveniently, this is also why it’s hard to know where to start.
To help you with that, I’ve boiled down my own side project experiences into three tips. These tips can apply broadly to any type of creative project you might want to do. Let’s get into it! 👇
How to get started
Tip #1: Decide what you want to accomplish
Creative corners of the internet are inundated with guidance about what you should learn and why. Influencers advise on what design programs to master. Blogs dissect how to replicate the trendiest new illustration style. And with recent innovations in artificial intelligence, opinions have intensified. But following this discourse, as urgent and convincing as it is, will lead to burnout.
Instead, start with your own goals. Ask yourself questions like:
What skills do I want to develop? What skills would be helpful for the job I want? (If you’re unsure about this, consider conducting a few informational interviews.)
What result do I want to achieve? For example, if your portfolio is lacking a certain type of project, you can work backward to figure out what kind of personal project would fill that gap.
What do I want to learn more about? This could be specific programs, like Adobe Illustrator or Cinema 4D. Or it could be broad subjects: native wildlife, design history, or mindfulness meditation.
What am I currently inspired by? Art styles, designers you admire, or your lived experiences are all possible sources of inspiration. By folding these into your project, you’ll feel more excited about the work and your end result will be more unique. Any inspirations that don’t find their way into your project will fuel your momentum for future ones.
With these points applied, your goal might be:
To design a zine about fast fashion to use as an editorial project on my portfolio
To create an illustration using a subject and/or color palette I’m not as comfortable with
To create a series of digital art exploring my mental health journey
To create a video documentary about sustainability, so I can learn how to use Adobe Premiere while also exploring my interest in the environment
To publish a short story about my experience of remote job hunting
As you can see, you don’t need to restrict your project goals to career goals. Projects can also be used to explore potential interests.
Tip: Your goals will change with each project and each life chapter you find yourself in. When I was starting out, I focused on practicality: developing a variety of skills and creating material for my portfolio, resume, and future interviews. As I gained more experience, my goals shifted toward carving out deeper design expertise and filling in gaps in my skill set. These goals manifested as more creative, exploratory personal projects.
Tip #2: Assess your schedule
Similar to understanding your goals is understanding your time. Prominent fixtures in your schedule might be a full-time job, school, and domestic labor — necessary commitments. But your time might also slip away in less perceptible ways: social media, procrastination, or other distractions can bloat your schedule until you feel like you have no time (or energy) left. Noticing these habits is the first step toward starting your personal project. And curbing them each time they arise makes the difference between a finished project and one that falls apart.
To assess your current schedule, first consider what necessary commitments you have. These might be regular and predictable, or they might be more sporadic. Based on this, look for pockets of uninterrupted time you can set aside consistently to work on your project. Thirty-minute sessions 3 times a week might be all you can spare. Or it could be an hour after work each day. But it needs to be uninterrupted, so you can focus more deeply, and consistent, to push forward to your end result.
There’s no magic formula to calculate how many hours your project will require or what time of day you should work. Only experimentation will reveal, eventually, what works best for you. But by setting aside the time and committing to it, you can start to recognize your own preferences and habits — which will be advantageous for future projects.
Tip #3: Set a deadline
The beauty of personal projects is that there are (usually) no outside expectations. There’s no client pressing for progress updates or requesting yet another revision. Unless you’ve mentioned it to others, no one will even be aware that you’re working on something. So why impose a deadline?
In its own mysterious way, work will often expand to fill the amount of time set aside. (Distractions, whether internal or external, are often the culprit.) So when it comes to your personal project, if you shrug and tell yourself that you’ll finish when you finish, chances are that the finish line will continue shifting. Every setback, complication, or skipped session will push it back.
To set a deadline, consider your goal and schedule. Make an educated guess on how much time feels appropriate for your project. When in doubt, I recommend two to three weeks.
Despite how compressed it may feel, two to three weeks is a more forgiving amount of time than longer stretches. It’s short enough that you’ll reach the finished result quickly (helpful in situations where you need it for your job hunt). But it can also be a relief if you encounter significant problems with your project. If your schedule isn’t working, or the project is bigger than you thought, you’ll soon reach a stopping point where you can reassess.
As you become more experienced with personal projects, you can adjust the timeline. Shorter deadlines can be energizing and produce many different projects over time, whereas longer deadlines can allow for more detail and complexity in a single piece. But the practice of setting a deadline and finishing on time, regardless of how you feel about the result, is vital. It’ll boost your confidence and bring you satisfaction upon reaching the finish line. And if you feel like your project still needs more work, you can follow this process again for the next leg of it.
“Therefore think small. Decide what corner of your subject you’re going to bite off, and be content to cover it well and stop. This is also a matter of energy and morale. An unwieldy [project] is a drain on your enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is the force that keeps you going.”
— William Zinsser
With these tips, you’ll create a flexible structure for your personal projects; just fill in the gaps and repeat for any project you imagine. And as you work on more projects over time, you might start to notice other, more unexpected benefits: you’ll learn much more than you set out to. You’ll qualify for opportunities that are unique to you and tailored to your new skill set. And you’ll know yourself better because you’ve challenged yourself to grow outside of your comfort zone. Good luck! ⭐
If you’re interested in reading more, drop a like on this article and share it with a friend. You can also find me online at wontonface.com. To request a topic for a future article, submit it here.
Super helpful tips for assessing and applying! Thanks Nicole!