8 Steps to Complete Your Data Projects and Build Your Portfolio

Building your data portfolio can be daunting, especially in the first few projects. This was my situation up until recently:

Tons of ideas for a project → I started working on one → Got overwhelmed → Second-guessed the project → Compared it to what others have worked on → Pressed pause on the project → Moved on to another one

… and the cycle continued. I had lost count of the number of incomplete projects on my laptop. What changed for me? I started following 8 steps that have helped me organise my projects, finish them and build my portfolio.

Step 1: Work on your mindset 🧘

I adopted a strategy to improve my mindset from the book Atomic Habits by James Clear called: “The aggregation of marginal gains”.

If you haven’t read the book (I highly recommend it!) or come across this strategy, it focuses on small margins of daily improvement (as small as 1%). These gains may seem insignificant in the short run, but it has a significant benefit in the long run:

From the book: 1% daily, consistent improvements over a year means you can be 37 times better than when you started [Equation: 1.01³⁶⁵ = 37.78].