I've recently started sending my todo lists to my friends and asked them to do the same. The progress I've made is substantial. Tasks I haven't finished in years were done in a week, and I finished significantly more work than I set out to do. One of my side projects which has been sitting idle for over a year will be finished this weekend.
Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?
51–60 of 145 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?
#52If I've invested a lot of time into something, then I feel invested in the project to go through some minor pain.
If i'm willing to endure major pain, it's no longer a side project.
Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?
#53By not having kids. Not over working at day job.
Having children can provide a huge boost to your motivation.
Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?
#54Ship quick and get users. My passion project [1] started as a weekend endeavor, I started hosting it on campus at school immediately and the users began rolling in. Now it's got an install base of about 5 that I know of and a userbase in the hundreds (it's popular with the VPN and darknet crowds). Having other people besides me who care about the project is the sole thing that has kept me interested and pushing. Just make sure to sell your project hard to your friends and family, and make sure that you never stop being a user.
For things that are fun to make but nobody would want to use, beats me. Those things I usually play with until I run out of steam, at which point I figure I've learned what I'm going to learn from them and move on.
Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?
#55How? By wanting to work on things that you want to work on, more than you want to watch TV, or play a video game, or do anything else.
The thing it came down to for me is understanding how incredibly rewarding it is to create cool things that I use. For example, the digital situation of Chess really sucks in the work right now, so for the last few months I've devoted about 10 to 15 hours a week to created a catch all solution to playing chess online and on your phone. It's gotten to the point where I can now use it to play with my brother, dad, sister and friends. As a person that lives a fair ways away from my family, it's really rewarding to be able to do something like that. I love getting input from them, and just being able to bond with them over something simple.
As far as the motivation, and not just the desire, it also came down to understanding how I work. I burn out quickly if I work on something a ton, and so I have an incredibly strict schedule during the week, and then completely leave the weekends open. Essentially, I kind of made a compromise with my personality so that I ended up happier, and my professional life came out ahead.
In addition to that, I educated myself. I realized what I wanted to be in 40 years, and I found out how other really smart people did it. The books below really had a major influence on me in motivating myself to work harder at everything, and to motivate me to work on side projects.
Lastly, and for myself this is huge, I surrounded myself by people I wanted to become. It's really really really hard to do stuff on your own, so I worked hard to become friends with smarter people than me, that challenged me at life, for lack of a better way to put it. I know stuff that like may sound a little cliché, but it really is one of the most rewarding things I've been able to do in my life.
Book List: 1. Without their permission. Alexis Ohanian 2. Outliers. Malcolm Gladwell 3. How to Win Friends and Influence People. Dale Carnegie 4. Hackers and Painters. Paul Graham
Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?
#56"How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?" By going to work everyday.
Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?
#57I was having trouble staying motivated. Now I've quit my job and motivation magically appeared :)
Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?
#58You prioritize it. If you don't want to prioritize it you are working on the wrong project.
It doesn't matter if it's two our daily or two days a month. If you are working on something you like you will prioritize it.
So don't be afraid to kill a project that you don't want to prioritize.
Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?
#59Lots of great answers here. One I don't see is to work with somebody else on the project. Holding yourself accountable to somebody else can be a lot more motivating. In addition, it's hard to get a pat on the back from an end user for doing some things, like unit testing or setting up an LLC, but with a parter these baby steps seem more significant.
If you choose to work solo, bring in a friend - preferably who is working on their own side project - to mentor you. Try scheduling work time together or swapping expertise (e.g. design feedback or code review). I worked on a project in parallel with a friend's project, and we did IDoneThis updates to each other every day. That accountability helped to motivate both of us, and rather than give up when we got stuck, we had somebody to talk through issues with.
An organizatoinal tip is to set up a personal kanban and break everything that you are doing into tasks. Jumping into a large project that takes months can seem like a neverending tunnel, but being able to see incremental progress in terms of completed cards every day can be motivating. When you start to lose focus, look back at the cards and see what you are supposed to be working on or pick another card.
Finally, don't lose sight of the end user - build something that people love, and keep dialogue with your customers before you launch the product. Get feedback, shadow them, identify pain points, grab coffee - a project become a lot more real when you humanize the end user.
Good luck!
Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?
#60Combine more projects into the same codebase. With games this is easy - make a "multicart" game that has more than one game in the same program.
Once that is done, you always have the whole portfolio of unfinished-yet-related things sitting there. If you can't work on any of them, you start a new one, but eventually you hit the point where you can see that you're just redoing an old one. You don't get stuck on overengineering it because the context of it is already as a small part of a whole. If one of them proves to be a really good idea and more deserving of attention, you chop it out of the original context.