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Ask HN: How to maintain motivation through project completion?

8 points by DylanDmitri ↗ HN
New dev here. Once I see a clear path to a solution, I lose interest and find it difficult to “wrap things up”. This leaves me juggling multiple unfinished projects and results in wasted effort.

People who’ve outgrown similar issues — can you share what helped you? Thank you in advance.

7 comments

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throwaway888abc
Write a journal. Remember, why you started.

>Once I see a clear path to a solution, I lose interest

You have just satisfied your curiosity successfully! That's great outcome too. You learned a lot.

Whatever you do, Have fun, you live only once.

2c

taauji
I call my mom everyday to tell her my goals for the next day and how I did on my goals yesterday. I think it is a good practice because

- it keeps me accountable

- it helps me to talk to myself, in a more efficient manner

- it is a good thing to talk to your parents. she feels really nice about it

Before this I used to write in a journal, but I have found this to be much more efficient and has several side benefits.

You can also try finding someone close parents/siblings/friend/sibling etc.

dave_sid
I think whatever you are building needs to have a purpose. If you know it’s just a throwaway project then it will be hard to motivate yourself to finish it. If you build something for people to use, then the goal is to finish it and support it.
giantg2
I strongly agree with this. When I am doing hobby projects, I can easily maintain my motivation because I believe in the value of the product and I'm working tk implement my own vision. When I am working at my job, I find the architecture and design parts fairly interesting, but I've come to hate the implementation due to either a lack of belief in the product or the overbearing bureaucracy.

Sadly, I have not found a real solution for this at my job. I have tried changing teams, but I usually find similar issues on each - the biggest being a lack of confidence in how the business product owner is handling the system's business process design. So I just carry on, knowing that I'll never get promoted or be a respected part of the system. I've spent the last 5 years in this mindset and it's terrible, but at least I can support my family (what was that quote from Home Improvement... something like 'there's no such thing as a crappy job if you're using that money to support your family').

dave_sid
I think this the main reason people do side projects, so you are in good company. Some lucky ones might turn their side projects into their job.
goodpeoplewin
On the "juggling multiple unfinished projects" I outgrew this successfully. What it took was to accept accountability. I have a trusted mate that I talk with, and update him on where my current project is at, so I can't just let it slide. We both understand and agree that starting something new can't happen unless we've discussed the previous thing: dropping it is fine, but needing to give a reason first is the difference. This has prevented me from (1/n) assing n things many times, and persisting.
Jugurtha
Get users and give them a way to interact with you and each other, such as a Slack workspace for the project. Users help you focus on what matters in terms of bugs and features, and help you maintain a sense of urgency.

During the development of our platform, we set students of our colleague with accounts to prepare their final year projects in machine learning. The platform is supposed to lower the barrier to entry for machine learning, and provide a self service interface for people who are not familiar with tracking, deployment, etc. What better user than students to test that it works?

It's impressive the number of problems even thirty users taking your product for a spin can surface, and after many of them complain about something, it is obvious you need to fix it or add a feature to solve a legitimate problem.