Regardless of the type of project you’re working on – being side projects, freelance projects, or corporate projects – one of the things that plagues businesses the most is scope creep.

To be clear, this is not an indictment of any one party – this is something that affects anyone and everyone who is working on a product.

Look at it this way:

• For side projects, we convince ourselves that adding just one more feature will make it all the better than it is in the current state never mind the fact that you can continue to work on this as your time permits.
• For freelance projects, we either take the route of convincing our customer than this will be one more thing to enhance the experience, or the customer asks for just one more thing in order to “take it to the next level” never minding the idea that there is time, budgets, and constraints involved.
• For corporate projects, this may vary widely but it can go anywhere from upper-management saying that feature-X should be implemented in order to stay competitive, or it can come from a major third-party client who has the money to fund the quick turn around of a feature.

The reason that I believe this is important is two fold:

1. Products should have lifetimes.
2. Time is our most valuable resource.

Nothing novel, is it?

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Several months ago, I stumbled across this video featuring Robert Herjavec (most notably from Shark Tank these days), and there were a number of things he said in the video that resonated with me.

I wanted to share it because not only do I think it’s worth a watch, but because I also think there are a number things that’ll resonate with many of you, as well:

Whenever I watch videos like this, one of the hardest things to do is to distill some of my favorite quotes into a single post, but in an effort to do just that, I thought I’d share some of the ones I like and how they relate to what I – and many of you – do for a living (or for a hobby), and then just list the rest as ones that I also enjoyed.

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This is the third post in a series on how to achieve simplicity with WordPress meta boxes.

In this series, I’ve been talking a little bit about how to simplify the code that we write by breaking it down into more modular components, and I’ve been doing so in the context of WordPress meta boxes.

To be clear, the point of this series is not simply to walk through how to keep the logic organized that goes into meta boxes, but to talk about the various parts that go into making up a component of a WordPress projects and how we can approach them through the their specialized areas of concern, and the how and why it’s important to do this.

In the previous post, I mentioned:

1. The Server-Side Logic
2. The Presentation Logic

And then I asked about how we actually go about representing the data. In this post, we’ll do exactly that.

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