Here’s how I’m 100% confident my Voyage 4 project will get finished

“A long-exposure shot of a freeway leading into the city with red and yellow light trails” by Joey Kyber on Unsplash

Since we are just under a month away from the finishing date of Voyage 4, I thought it could be a good idea to write an article on why I’m so confident my team is going to finish. And how you can be too.

The truth is, I’ve had this confidence from day 0.

Of course, as a team we’ve had the usual set backs

1. Our project manager had to leave the team just two weeks ago due to personal reasons.
2. All of our team are part-timers with full time jobs, so sometimes we go days without communication. Or sometimes we won’t be able to contribute anything for a week due to external circumstances.
3. We have timezone issues — so we are rarely online at the same time.
4. The first time we were all online at the same time was 3 weeks into the voyage! This was also our first team meeting (at midnight my time)
5. We can’t even have voice/video meetings due to poor internet connectivity issues, so everything needs to be done in chat at snails pace!

And on top of all that, we are building our app in using a framework I have never even used before!!

So, you might be wondering why — given all of these reasons for failure that I’m so confident we can finish our project. And how have I had this confidence since day 0, before I even knew my team of any of these issues we’d be facing? Before all of these setbacks.

Quite simply, I’ve committed to finishing.

There are no excuses. There are no external forces that can stop me.

Now this isn’t me ripping on me team mates. My team mates are awesome, and they’re committed just like me, we’ve been able to find a groove these last couple of weeks and are working well together.

My only point is that when you commit yourself to finishing your project, truely commit, then nothing can stop you.

Now you might be asking yourself

But what if I don’t know how to do XYZ by myself?

Definitely get help from your team mates when you can — you’re all in this together after all.

But don’t forget that Chingu is not just groups of individual teams building separate projects at the same time. Chingu is a community of developers all willing to help, and learning together. I like to think of it like we’re all in the same team, so don’t be afraid to ask! :)

I have committed myself to finishing this project, all other factors don’t matter.

Don’t worry about what’s out of your control, you can’t do anything about it anyway so it’s just wasted energy. Focus on what you can control.

These are some things I can control:

1. I can dedicate one hour every second morning to working on my project.
2. I can leave as many positive messages as I can in my teams group chat, for them to read when they next come online.
3. I can be an active participant in the chingu slack channels so we can all continue to learn and get better.
4. I can commit to finishing this voyage 4 project!

So commit to finishing and I’ll see you at the finish line. You got this!