I recently found myself with a need for project tracking software of certain and specific proportions. It's a metaproject I'm working on this time. I'm going to be doing some work for one person (honestly, one guy, that's it, and just the one thing since I'm always running out of time) and need to be able to keep track of what I did, when I did it, how long it took, and notes about it. At some interval, I need to total up the time I spent and then make some descriptive text to that effect, which I can copy and paste into email or print. Having something which automatically summarizes the above in email would be very nice indeed. Icing on the cake...
Sounds easy, eh? Easy enough that a fruitless freshmeat.net search for such a software package didn't dishearten me into not trying to build something myself at around midnight on a Friday. I really am trying not to roll my own all the time, I swear. (As proof, I even bought a book on x86 assembly programming yesterday, which virtually guarantees that I won't do anything but learn something new and obscure and partially useless for at least six months.) I just couldn't help myself this time, and there really was nothing out there that does what I want. So I had to build something myself.
Well, I got the database designed for this project task tracker. It only has five tables. It could have had 100, easy. It's the sort of project that lends itself to easy and unthinkingly instant blossoming. You might have more than one project, users that have tasks associated with more than one project, tasks that span projects, projects which span customers, estimates (not only billing) reports combining any of the aformentioned, ad infinitum. It can get really silly. I even put in some user authentication stuff, with crypto. Ultimate silliness!
So after getting the database "done" I rabbittrailed my way into a couple hundred lines of PHP code which, while nice and dandy and a good starting point, doesn't run. It has bits which, when fleshed out, will do all sorts neat of things. Assuming it gets completed. It may not. At this point, I'm happy enough entering info using plain SQL. But it feels like an interesting project, and one that I think I'd be very good at. The trouble is I'm tired now, and tomorrow I won't be bored. I'm rarely bored, so the odds of this being what occupies my next period of non-boredom is slim. I know this from personal experience.
Which leads me to a concluding thought: The art of not being bored is in finding things to do which are only just complicated and time consuming enough such that they can be completed in the time it takes for something else more interesting to come along.