Ask HN: People who enjoy coding in free time, what does your process look like?

I don't program in my job, so coding in free time has been a wonderful creative outlet. These past few weeks, however, have been a slog to open the IDE; often distracting myself instead with watching edu material on writing better unit tests, binge reading HN, etc.

One new habit which has somewhat worked was inspired by Neil Gaiman's writing process (ie. sitting in a quiet place where the only two choices are to write or do nothing until boredom inspires writing) - I've started sitting at home, without music and with a notebook, where the only two choices are to do nothing or write pseudo code for the immediate next exciting feature.

As you may have guessed, at this moment this new process isn't quite working; curious to hear from anyone who enjoys coding at home / in free time: what does your lifestyle around those programming hours look like? Thanks!

I don't do open source contribution a lot so it's mostly my own stuff.

There is no inherent pleasure in the process itself.

In solving puzzles - yes, in overcoming obstacles - sure, in seeing final product working and not failing - of course.

But coding itself is a boring but inevitable process of reaching some goal(s).

Thus the only reliable and long lasting source of motivation is a specific idea (product) in mind you want to create (no matter how small or simple).

This what can drive you no matter whats snacks or laptop or wifi you have. Without any rituals.

But pushing yourself to code without a good goal is a waste of time.

Set a small goal and only when it's finished start working on something else, make a kanban board with small tasks. Don't think too far ahead with "oh, I'd like to add x in the future, so I should architect y so that's possible". Don't endlessly review and refine the code you've already written trying to achieve perfection.

By all means capture these next features in a notebook, but act like you're working on a 'real' project and have an actual deadline. It might also help to make commitments to show other people what you've done, I always work best when I have an audience otherwise I quickly fall into the trap of trying to make the perfect system because I know there's no hard-limit on my time. YMMV obviously.