Ask HN: How do you motivate yourself to keep working on a project?

The resistance stage that you've hit is always a killer. It leaves more projects like yours dead before they're finished than anything else. The problem with replying to this, is the answer is subjective and will vary person to person. We all use different methods to motivate.

Sometimes I'll re-read a book. Masters of Doom is motivational for me as one example.

Sometimes I'll take a long'ish break (weeks) and teach myself something new just purely for fun. Experiment with something, that may or may not relate to the project. I divert my brain to an enjoyable stretch of time, a vacation, to prepare it for the final forced crunch of work.

I recently blew off a month and did almost nothing, when I could have completed what I'm working on. I got to the 85% finished line and hit hard resistance mentally. Some of that is feeling exhausted (it can feel like it sneaks up on you all at once), a lot of it is arriving at a large batch of work that I really don't enjoy doing. Combine those two and your brain puts on a yellow vest and begins protesting the longer you persist.

I've found that after taking a break, controlled anger is extremely effective as a helper for a final push over the line. That is, getting pissed off about the situation of having allowed myself to lose momentum and burn time rather than finishing something that is ~85-90% done and could have already been completed if I had simply maintained a steady momentum. I direct that anger in a focused manner as a big punch at the project that puts me over the remaining hurdle/s. It gets me into a mindset where I can just grit my teeth and dig through whatever shit I have to get done. Then the final 2-3% is usually just basic clean-up on loose ends or polish, truly trivial work.

Some might suggest that anger is always a negative. I strongly disagree with that. I think it's highly useful when channeled properly (never at others, and never in a serious self-harm form) and so long as it's not a common occurance during a project. It's critical to differentiate between using anger to overcome a self-challenge you're certain that you want to overcome, versus working on something you don't actually want to do. And to be clear, I'm not talking about rage or anything so dramatic. Rather, an internal expression of: damnit, fuck this, I'm going to finish it and nothing is going to stop me (except in my head it's all capitalized).

I always try to remind myself that the thing I'm building, I really, really want to see it live. I want to see it exist in the world, to see other people get value out of it. I set out on the journey for a reason.

If I were in your shoes (and I've been at this exact stage), I would manually bill until I had enough clients to worry about it.

You can do a half and half approach. Let the user know that they will be invoiced, and a representative will reach out to take their payment information. For example, if I was using Stripe (the payment processor I'm familiar with), I would setup my register button to just send me an email with data that I could then enter into Stripe manually, ie. name, email address, etc. I wouldn't include CC info in this because I wouldn't want to deal with compliance. Since you told them to expect a call and you're invoicing them you've got a good reason to call. If you go this route let the user use your product right away. The other cool thing about this approach is that you can also start to build a rapport with your clients, which pays dividends when you want to solicit feedback.

I find that motivation really spikes when you start seeing sales and money rolling in.

We have an "accountability group" that is amazingly powerful at addressing this, for people who are willing to admit they have issues with procrastination and motivation, and are committed to addressing it and helping others address it as well. This is mostly for the self-employed especially those that otherwise work mostly solo so they don't otherwise get a lot of external stimulus, which is essential to many people.

The only thing I've found that comes anywhere close to this is Adderall, and that has awful side effects.

I've been in several of these type of groups over the years, and they usually fail because people flake and no one calls them on it. I think we've finally gotten the formula right though. The main thing is that people who aren't doing their part will get a warning and get removed from the group if they don't take it to heart. We make it indirect....instead of calling someone on it directly, you tell someone else, and they address it with the person.

I could describe our whole system in more detail (there are a lot of little tweaks we've made), but the main thing that is important is that you have to think of it as a complex engine that needs fine tuning to keep "firing on all cylinders". Don't be shy about telling others what you need. But mostly, make sure that everyone is vigilant. If you flake on the tasks you are committing to, we can work with that. If you flake on monitoring others, you get a warning and if you keep doing it you are out.

One of the things we've found works well is to structure tasks so that getting started in the morning (or after a long break) is easy and -- if possible -- fun. That is, you never leave a task in a state where you have a long "warm up" period. Get it to a place where it is satisfying to work with before you put it down. This often means finishing up a major task, then starting a new one and just getting it going before you call it a day. And of course write some documentation (which could just be a todo list) before you stop work.

We're eventually planning on doing this in a bigger way (with a web app, etc), but for now we're open to bringing new people in if they are very VERY committed. Get in touch if you are interested (rjbrown at gmail). You need to be willing to use Skype video chat several times a day.

Get married, buy a house, have kids. Then you know you have to finish your work because you are responsible for others.

Would love to see a "whole system in more detail" write-up!