There are currently lot of people doing freelance iOS work. And because it’s so easy to submit an app to the App Store, most of them have some personal app projects on the side. These two kind of projects are difficult to combine because they almost always conflict with each other. How often haven’t you delayed a personal project because a client deadline was coming up and you weren’t ready yet? Personal projects are the ones that are most easy to delay, because the the commitment you have to them is only to yourself. Everybody knows that you need to be really disciplined to make a personal deadline, because there are few consequences of not meeting it.
Think about this, does actually nobody know about your app? You’ve most likely told someone about it. Ideas are worthless anyway. You probably have some testers using a beta version of your app and providing you feedback. You can use these people for more than just discovering bugs in your code.
When it comes to deadlines and finishing projects, it is all about commitment. You probably think you’re committed to your personal projects, but if you delay them as soon as a deadline of a client comes up, you aren’t really. The problem here is that you don’t have a commitment to real people for finishing your project.
Luckily you already know real people, the only thing you need to do is to tell them about your plans. Let your testers now when you plan to release the next beta version and what features will be added. Tell your friends when you will be publishing your app to the App Store. This way your commitment isn’t only to yourself, but to a real person. And if you’re lucky, that person will ask you about it if you don’t deliver on time. Of course a deadline of a client is probably still more important than one that you made up yourself, but at least your commitment will be to real people, which makes you more likely to deliver.