2,843 days for a 365-day project

On November 10, 2018, I uploaded the first photo of a project that was supposed to last 365 days. I took the last one on August 23, 2026.

Two thousand eight hundred and forty-three days. Seven years and nine months for a one-year project.

I’m not going to write the post where that becomes an inspiring lesson about discipline, because it wasn’t. It was the opposite: a very long record of every time I failed and came back anyway. But I finished it, and I think the honest version of that story is more useful to someone than the heroic one.

The project

The premise is the oldest one in photography: one photo a day, every day, for a year. The point isn’t to make good photos. It’s to force yourself to look. When you know you have to produce an image today, you start seeing frames on your commute, in the kitchen, in the doctor’s waiting room. The project doesn’t teach you to use the camera — it teaches you not to switch your eyes off.

I’d done shorter challenges before: thirty days with a fixed 24mm, thirty with kit lenses, sixty with an 8mm fisheye. I finished all of them. A year, I figured, is the same thing twelve times over.

It is not the same thing twelve times over.

The first year was almost perfect

The 2019 numbers still surprise me: 141 photos. I was in rhythm, the habit was installed, I went out with the camera without it being an event. That’s the year the project worked the way it was meant to.

And then 2020 happened.

Four photos

In all of 2020 I uploaded four photos.

Four.

I don’t need to explain what happened that year — we were all there. But I want to be precise about how it feels from inside a project like this: you don’t abandon it one day with a decision. You abandon it without noticing. One day you don’t go out, and nothing happens. Within a week you’ve stopped thinking about the camera. Within a month, every time you see it on the desk you feel a small, irritating guilt, and that guilt makes you avoid it more. My longest gap was 168 days. Almost six months without pressing the shutter once for the project.

That’s where most 365 projects die, and rightly so. The premise is already broken. It isn’t “a photo a day” anymore. The project, technically, failed.

What I did instead of deleting it

I never declared the project dead. I also never restarted it from zero, which was the obvious temptation — start over, clean rules, this time for real.

I decided the only rule left was that photos were still missing to reach 365, and that I was going to take them. Whenever.

It sounds like cheating and it probably is. But look at what happened after 2020:

Nineteen. Twenty. Thirty-one. Twenty-three. Thirty-six. Thirty-eight.

I never got back to the 2019 pace. Not even close. But I never went back to zero either. For five years the project moved slowly, with month-long pauses, with no drama whatsoever, and it kept going. The final average was one photo every 7.8 days, and only 10.5% of the days in those almost eight years had a photo.

That 10.5% is the whole project. It isn’t the story of someone consistent. It’s the story of someone who didn’t close the door.

What this has to do with writing software

I work as a contractor. Over these almost eight years I changed projects and teams more times than I can count, and that instability was part of why the project kept collapsing. But it also taught me something that applies equally to both.

In development we’re trained to think in velocity. Sprints, deliveries, sustained pace. And for team work that’s fine. But personal projects don’t run on that metric, and applying it to them is the surest way to kill them. A side project that moves two commits a month for three years gets much further than one that opens with forty commits in two weeks and dies.

The metric that matters personally isn’t how much you moved this week. It’s whether the project is still alive. A living project with zero progress this month can be picked up again. One you declared dead cannot.

The other thing: the urge to restart clean is almost always procrastination dressed up as rigor. Rewrite the service from scratch, migrate everything to the new framework, start the 365 over with the rules properly set. It feels productive because it’s work. But it’s work that returns you to the starting point, and the starting point is the most comfortable place in the world because you haven’t failed at anything there yet.

I could have restarted the project in 2021 with the rules intact. I would have failed the same way, because the rules were never the problem.

The photos

They’re all here, in chronological order. It isn’t a portfolio — there are frankly bad photos in there, especially from the lean years, and I left them in. Taking them out would tell the story backwards.

I also put all of them into a 46-second video, one after another: YouTube · Instagram · TikTok. Seen in sequence, the passing of the years shows more than in any single photo.

Looking at them in sequence, you can see where I was doing well and where I was surviving. The 2019 ones have intent: considered compositions, planned outings. The middle years are more domestic — things around the house, the desk, the same street as always. Those are the ones I like most now, even though they’re worse photographs. They’re the proof of the days I picked up the camera anyway.

The ending

There was no epic moment. Photo 365 was an ordinary photo on an ordinary day, and I noticed the number afterward, going through the album.

And that’s fine. After almost eight years the last thing the project needed was a grand finale. It just needed to end.

I’ve already started thinking about the next one. This time without a deadline.