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Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?

#71

Post by reboog711 »

I imagine the money this new crazy idea is gonna bring in; and how I'm going to use that 'windfall' to fund the new crazy idea I can't stop thinking about..

I have yet to have one of 'side' projects make me rich enough to fund my next side project, though... Really the side projects just keep me fresh and expose me to new technologies concepts in a way that I would not get from client work.

Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?

#72

Post by super-serial »

DennisP wrote: post #57

I was having trouble staying motivated. Now I've quit my job and motivation magically appeared :)

I got a full-time job and my motivation magically appeared for my side projects.

Before I was basically a bum that occasionally did contract work... now I work 40 hrs at my job, and 20 hrs at a coworking space on my startup. My hatred for the 9-5 job is what motivates me.

Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?

#73

Post by sgold515 »

I have a Big Board in my room with my goals listed. It helps when you visually reinforce yourself.

Also I have a physical calendar in my room. I want to go to the gym 70% of days in the year so cross a day off each time I do cardio/lift. I stole this technique from Jerry Seinfeld who used it for writing jokes :)

Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?

#74

Post by otaviogood »

Don't be afraid to drop a project. I tend to have a handful of projects going at any one time. A good project will stand out and it will pull you through to completion. Pretty much all of my significant jobs were spun out of my side projects. My current job started as a side project that I prototyped in a few weeks. A company was built around it and now our company is part of Google. This. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2OfQdYrHRs

Take note of things that inspire you. For me, books or other people's projects. Show your work to your friends and try to convince your friends to work on projects with you.

Find programming languages / environments that make it easy to spin up a simple project without too much overhead. Start small. Last I counted, I have about 140 folders in my dev directory. Each one has a small project I started up. One turned into a successful company. Another won a DARPA challenge. A few others were released in various forms. But most got dropped because they just weren't as cool as something else. And I think dropping projects isn't just ok, it's great fun and will help you find that project that's worth completing.

Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?

#75

Post by plinkplonk »

gavanwoolery wrote: post #42

I turned my side project into a unicorn job. It only took about 10 years of hard work...but I did it the hard way. Find the easiest thing that you are legitimately passionate about. Do not work on a project because it is in a popular space, because you are looking to make a quick buck, or any other reason than you are undeniably interested in the space. If you are not interested in the project, it will become boring…

"I turned my side project into a unicorn job. It only took about 10 years of hard work...but I did it the hard way."

Sounds fascinating. Could you give more details? What was your sideproject? What did you do to turn it into a unicorn job? Thanks in advance.

Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?

#76

Post by otaviogood »

zxcdw wrote: post #26

I think it might be interesting to note that different people have different motivations for "side projects" (as well as different definitions for side projects!). For someone, a side project might be about solving arbitrary problems such as trying to write a Tetris clone under, say 1024 bytes on x86-64 Linux machine -- something which has absolutely no real world relevance whatsoever, while for someone else that'd m…

Since you mentioned it, me and at least 2 other people have written Tetris in 256 bytes. I used 80286 assembly and you probably can't get away with that these days - even when I did, it was already old. 64 bit code will probably be much bigger. But the main trick besides the right instruction set is to use XOR for drawing, erasing, and collision checks. Have fun!

Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?

#77

Post by dba7dba »

super-serial wrote: post #72
DennisP wrote: post #57

I was having trouble staying motivated. Now I've quit my job and motivation magically appeared :)

I got a full-time job and my motivation magically appeared for my side projects. Before I was basically a bum that occasionally did contract work... now I work 40 hrs at my job, and 20 hrs at a coworking space on my startup. My hatred for the 9-5 job is what motivates me.

"My hatred for the 9-5 job is what motivates me." This.

Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?

#78

Post by ChuckMcM »

Like others here, if I lose steam on one, I switch to another. The novelty effect is real. To support switching though I have to use a notebook. As I get to the point where a project is feeling more drag than energizing, I write down everything about it that I have in my head at that point into my notebook. Then I find another project I had left in that state, read the page(s) on it, and spin it up.

Still, my biggest problem isn't losing steam its simply too many choices. I need to get better at deciding I'm not going to do a project and putting it down for good.

Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?

#79

Post by julienchastang »

joshu wrote: post #69

You will lose steam at some point. Go with the flow; take a break, try something else, come back to what matters. I put del.icio.us down for 6 months very early on.

Is that you Joshua Schachter? Del.icio.us was one of the greatest, and most underrated ideas to come out of the early web. For a while I would use del.icio.us as a search engine because it often gave better results than Google. If you can beat Google in search even in a limited area you are onto something big. (Am I remembering correctly that del.icio.us "static" pages would actually show as top Google hits?) Sadly del.icio.us has languished over the years under various owners. I still use it though and have a few thousand links saved.
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