Ask HN: How do you stay motivated when the project gets stale? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated when the project gets stale?

#21

Post by makeramen » Sat, Jul 24, 2010, 5:14 PM UTC

exline wrote: post #6

ToDo lists. I find that when I get bogged down for any reason, if I create a todo list of items that have to get done I'm more likely to do the items on the list. I tend to pick up momentum as I cross items off the list. Make the list a manageable size, finish it off and create a new one. For product related tasks, getting actual users and feedback from them is a huge motivator as well.

In response to the above replies, there are good and bad ways to write to-do lists:

http://www.43folders.com/2005/09/12/building-a-smarter-to-do...

http://www.43folders.com/2005/09/13/building-a-smarter-to-do...

http://lifehacker.com/270404/the-art-of-the-doable-to+do-lis...

and my personal spin:

http://vmi.posterous.com/epic-to-dos

Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated when the project gets stale?

#22

Post by syko » Sat, Jul 24, 2010, 5:23 PM UTC

Not leaving the polish for the last. I've noticed that it's bugfixes and the final polishing that are the most tedious (everything's done and most of it works).

I now polish, test and debug every bit of the project as I go along. It's very tempting to pinch all the fun parts out of the project right away (the core functionality) and leave the little stuff to the end, but this is gonna leave you with heck of a lot of little things to do after the project's ready.

But once you're already trapped in the little things, it's the todo lists: dividing it all up into as little pieces as possible and going at them one by one. This also forces you to measure how much of it is still to be done - otherwise you feel like every one of those last bits is going to be the last one. And when it isn't, it's going to feel like puke. .. and fixing bugs like this is also prone to create other bugs.

Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated when the project gets stale?

#23

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 24, 2010, 5:29 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How do you stay motivated when the project gets stale?

#24

Post by damoncali » Sat, Jul 24, 2010, 5:31 PM UTC

syko wrote: post #22

Not leaving the polish for the last. I've noticed that it's bugfixes and the final polishing that are the most tedious (everything's done and most of it works). I now polish, test and debug every bit of the project as I go along. It's very tempting to pinch all the fun parts out of the project right away (the core functionality) and leave the little stuff to the end, but this is gonna leave you with heck of a lot of…

I've tried that but found that it's best to polish at the end. Nothing wastes more time than throwing away polished code. I don't fine tune anything until I'm sure I'm going to use that code in production.