Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?

I have experienced this my entire life.

I'm interested in so many things that I cannot focus on one thing for too long or to completion. This really sucks when people ask what I do with my time because I have nothing fully realized yet I did spend the whole time tinkering in my own way.

I overcome this a little with discipline. I just have discipline and a clear path/plan and go step by step through to completion.

I'm probably going to pick up a book or two that is mentioned in this thread.

INTP here. Starting projects and having multiples at once sure seems comfortable, but, ADD does not. It is a measure of rigor that there are projects that get done. Now, there's something to be said for projects that were always "low priority" and are waiting for the right moment, but there are also ephemeral, same-day kind of projects that come from having the tools/resources available to you to scratch whatever itch you have.

IMO, OP's problem isn't that he/she can't decide which side project to do, it's that they have already decided that the side project involves coding, and they're already a good coder. Doing your job as a side project seems...boring. Pick something you don't know how to do, but wish you did. Learn CAD, use a bandsaw, 3D print a D20, or just take your bike all the way apart. This idea that every software engineer needs to treat software as their hobby is frustrating to me. Bankers, lawyers, and doctors don't do that, why should software engineers?

I've been in the same boat my whole life. But I'm currently working on a side project, and I've made substantial progress on it.

It arose as a natural fruit of a daily writing practice I instituted. That writing practice itself came out of a couple of things:

1. I owned my desire to create something. Instead of guilt tripping myself for not writing, imposing the "If you only had your shit together like everyone else, you'd etc etc etc" line of thinking on my behavior, I honestly looked at myself and said, "You know, this bothers you not because you're a bad person who can't get anything done, but because you want to write. If you decided not to write anything, you would still be a perfectly fine person and you could live a happy life."

2. I let go of the creative process as a way of achieving outcomes I wanted, and embraced it as a way to happily spend my free time and make things that satisfied my own standards.

A couple of months into my daily writing practice, it somehow mutated into a programming project. My programming still operates within the conceptual loop of my writing, but I suppose it could have turned into anything else.

My advice would be to reflect on what you're doing moment to moment and build a narrative around it. Sometimes it can be invaluable to just write down what happened: "Well, I was working on this roguelike in Rust, but then I saw some blog posts about Common Lisp and decided I'd write a graphical solitaire game in CL." And from there you can understand why it is you are doing what you are doing, which will probably be more effective than castigating yourself for doing what you're doing.

This works for me:

Let's say I have an idea and I spend a few hours researching about it and get very excited. I don't start working on it immediately. I sit on it for a few days and revisit the idea, say after a week. If I am still excited to work on it, I'll start working on the project, otherwise I drop it.

A few techniques that have worked well for me:

- Scope the project down to a size where you can achieve it within a week. Launch it and either let it take on a momentum of its own if others are interested in it (which will motivate you to do more work on it more). The initial version of your project could be as simple as a vision statement of what you want to achieve.

- Have a personal backlog where you can put ideas for other projects you're interested in working on. Resist the temptation to just jump into your latest idea and instead write about it. If its a compelling idea you will return to it. If not let it be a passing idea.

- Practice personal Kanban where you limit yourself to X number of concurrent projects. Wanting to work on a new project can be good motivation to finish your current one.

- Team up a collaborator to help keep each engaged, interested, and accountable.

- Find ways to create artificial deadlines for yourself. That could mean signing up to do a lighting talk at the next meetup, scheduling a meeting to get feedback with an end user or person advising you, etc.

- Relax and enjoy tinkering for the sake of tinkering. Even if you don't complete a project you're still learning something from the experience along the way and sometimes what you learn is that you like the idea of a particular project more than the reality of what it means to work on it