It is fair to say that contemporary Egypt is obsessed with projects (mashari‘), large and small. On the one hand, men from all social backgrounds are on the hunt for the right project: a business venture or investment that could generate monetary and non-monetary values for family, friends and community. On the other, the current military-dominated government invests enormous amount of capital and prestige in spectacular mega projects: land reclamations, fish farms, industrial zones, an expanded Suez Canal and a New Administrative Capital in the desert 45 km east of Cairo (see Sims, 2018). In this paper – which combines ethnographic material from ongoing fieldwork on micro-projects in Cairo’s grassroots football industry with experimental cartographic representations of a handful of small and large Egyptian projects – I suggest that projects, regardless of scale, could be analysed generatively as bundles of connections and separations. The way in which a project links up with resources, actors and institutions elsewhere – through geography, infrastructures, finance and personal connections – does not only give the project its meaning, value and ‘relative location’ (Green, 2016). Such links also imbue the project with particular temporalities and timescales. My ethnography identifies three notions of time within three different spatial constellations: in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s decision to build the High Dam in Aswan with Egyptian labour and Soviet instead of Western capital, a set-up that fostered specific national and trans-continental futures; in the repetitive cycles of start, stall and stop common in Egyptian micro projects, a result of break-downs of precious yet fragile human and material links; and in feelings of rootedness to kin and to community, a consequence of Egyptian projects’ tendency to mobilise extensive family networks and re-activate historical legacies in urban space. In conclusion, the paper zooms out from my empirical material from Egypt to make a general-methodological argument. Creative combinations of ethnography and cartography, I suggest, are especially suitable to elucidate interrelationships between spatial connections and temporal inflections. After all, while mappings of disconnections and connections provide snapshot-like visualisations of relative locations, narratives documented through long-term ethnography are unmatched in rendering nuances of longitudinal temporal experience. The material presented in this paper demonstrates the usefulness of bringing these two dimensions together.