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

that is absolutely true too.

I enjoy programming, and making things, but my side projects are the only code I write which really lets me be creative. So I keep going because I want to like what I do.

Also,sometimes the only thing keeping me going is the sunk cost fallacy. I don't want to just give up on something I spent months or years on.

But one think that did help me out was learning to recognize the difference between moving forward and moving in circles. Not wasting a lot of time refactoring stuff - especially if a lot of time has passed - because your tastes or mood has changed. I have one project (a web project, nothing anyone would care about) that I literally rebuilt from the ground up at least three times already, just because I got sick of the current framework I was using. I wasted a lot of time moving in circles because I didn't actually want to finish the project, but I did want to keep working on it.

I have too faced demotivation when it comes to side-projects. Until recently (64 days to be exact) I have started spending my morning's first 3 hours on my side projects.. and these side projects are not to make any extra pocket money.. but just that it is interesting and I get excited to learn something new while doing something which is interesting.

I get motivated even more seeing the github streak (github.com/rajeshvaya) and it a very small measure which helps me going as well.. everyday for past 64 days I have made sure I spend my first 3 hours of my morning time (even on weekends.. I make sure I get up early)

after you get this initial start it is kind of self-motivating which will keep you moving forward.

What i think is just 2 important things to get this:

1. Work on the projects which interest you and not because other people think its cool or just to make little amount of money

2. Try to spend first few hours of morning on your side project rather than ad-hoc amount of time and different time-span of day. Keep it regular, same time just like gym

In my free time, I mostly do whatever I feel like, so I experiment on random projects - I don't necessarily care whether I finish them, but I have fun and learn new things.

For me, a combination of these three things has proved to be successful:

1) Every day. I've seen this with working out, side projects, or whatever... I can't stick with commitments if I try for an "every other day" or "only weekdays" strategy. Has to be every day. [1]

2) Track it in a visible fashion. GitHub's contribution calendar is fantastic for this. I've got a text file named 'work-log.md' in my side project's folder, and I update and commit that file whenever I spend time on my side project-- even if all that I did that day was research, rather than coding. My current high score/longest streak is 59 days in a row, and wanting to push that higher is incredibly motivating. With workouts, some sort of fitness tracker serves the same purpose.

3) I don't beat myself up too long or hard about screwing up. There are some folks whose "longest streak" on GitHub is 365 days or more. Good for them! I'm always sad when I realize I've missed a day, and I often take a break for a week or two once that happens, but I've never even thought about just quitting. Just motivates me to try and do better next time.

[1] One exception to this was biking to work: I never really biked on the weekends, but it didn't prove to be a problem. Probably because commuting by bike was so hard to forget about.