Here's how you can balance time and prioritize tasks in programming contract projects.

To balance time while working on multiple projects you need to keep few pointers in mind: - Review project requirements, clarify ambiguities and list down deliverables. - Work back sheet : Break the project into manageable sub tasks with ETAs to track progress effectively. - Set a priority and define ordering for each task. - Optimize focus hours by minimizing interruptions and add time for each task in your calendar. - Maintain regular syncs with clients and team members to ensure alignment and address/raise concerns promptly. - Utilize project management tools like Trello, or JIRA etc to organize tasks, set reminders, and track progress.

Balancing time and prioritizing tasks in programming contract projects involves setting clear goals, breaking tasks into manageable chunks, and creating a schedule with deadlines for each task. Regularly review and adjust your priorities based on project progress and client needs. Communicate effectively with clients to manage expectations and avoid scope creep. Utilize productivity tools to stay organized and focused, ensuring you meet deadlines and deliver high-quality work.

A person will never succeed in a project without a great understand the scope. I don't think you should understand 100% of it before starting, because parts are more practical them theoretical, but there is a need to get at least an overview and be able to identify the points once they be mentioned or faced. These are the top parts that are important to get when understanding the project scope, in my opinion: - project goal and timeline - project architecture - team focus (specially because the project will probably have a big goal and some teams will be focused directly in the all possible forms of authentication, or in the cart page) - project rules - team maturity, experience and learning curve

In my career the milestones set I most enjoyed using was breaking the user stories into small tasks. That approach is good to add small increments as fast as possible and make them testable and ready to production, also is great to check the team delivery. But, lately, I am noticing that that approach is being replaced by another more focused on the actual user story. In that approach a task will be only done and ready to production when all the user story be coded and tested. I don't like this last one very much, because I think, specially in projects with multiple teams or devs working in the same project is more prone to merge conflicts and to another person code or logic overhides your increment.

Keeping focused can be a challenge for some people, there are a hundred of distractions that can prevent use to do our job if we don't take care. One approach I like to use to keep focused is using Pomofocus.io. It is a webapp that helps you to apply the pomodoro concept: 25 minutes of absolute focus for 5 minutes of rest, after 4 cycles you get a 15 minutes rest. It's very productive and also encourages the mind to rest. We all know that the most busy the mind be will be easier to get distracted.