Ask HN: Have you ever lost focus on your personal project?

Several things that have worked for me.

1) Exercise, a lot. Put it first, so that you'll actually do it.

2) Eat right. These things, exercise and food, can have a far greater impact on your work than you might realize.

3) Discipline. Show up and put the time in. Force yourself.

4) Pomodoro technique. Commit to yourself that you'll put in 2 solid 45 minute periods per day. Work your way up from there. You need to do it even when you don't feel like it.

5) Get friends who encourage you to be your best. If you don't have friends like that, contact me unoti2@gmail.com

What you need is discipline.

I did Ticketmaster's CheckDisk as my first operating system project at age 20. I modified installed language module code. I made the bulk of their report generator. I converted reports from ASM to Pascal. I made a file compression archiving package for the VAX and PC. When I changed school to electrical engineering for my masters, I changed departments at Ticketmaster. I made 68000 ASM image processing and mechanical design for a stack fed barcode reader. I made hardware and firmware for an 8051 300 VA Line conditioner. I made the firmware for a 68000 ASM Octart-based RS232 barcode reader networking device.

I think the problem is that your passion is for dropping out of school rather than the project at hand. When I look at coders (or anyone) who has a passion for something they'll do said task even if they're going for hours without sleep or even forget to eat.

Also if the project isn't that complicated how good of a demo can it be to get you this undefined full time job? Honestly finishing school may help you more in the long run (unless what you're doing at school has nothing to do with your career).

Many times. Usually I become disheartened at how difficult the project really is to complete. Then I ask myself if the project is really important to me. If I answer yes I try to break it down to the next 3 steps, and just commit to doing those three. Sometimes you need to learn something to make progress. After a few question - recommit - work cycles more will have been done on the project. Then you wind up refactoring!

I am also having my personal project alongside my full time job. Yes it is difficult to keep your focus on side project. I use to gain focus during the time i travel back to home from office ( plan all stuff during that period )

Strip the project down to the basics and get a working prototype online. Don't try to develop a fully featured project by waiting until step 10 is finished before launching. Instead, spend a weekend on step 1 and launch the site, then develop step 2, step 3, etc.

This way you and others can use the project as it develops. It's a lot more fun when you can play with a working prototype of your project at any given time, and you have users enjoying the service and requesting features. It's great motivation. Also, if you notice at step 3 or 4 that no one cares about your project, you can toss it in the garbage, move onto the next idea, and be glad you didn't wait until step 10 to launch and waste all that time.

When you bite off too much, the finish line is so far in the distance that you lose all motivation.

Here is how I got my passion, motivation, and ambition back. Let's call it my slump-buster. 1. Find Inspiration. It could be music, watching a movie about a start-up or some other inspiring story. For me it was listening to Brian Stevens keynote speech from the RedHat Summit on YouTube. If you listen to the past 3 years he makes it clear that software developers and Linux are going to rule the world. Use this as a tool to get you into your command center to get stuff done. 2. Do not come home from work and go to your command center or computer room. You need time away from the computer to remember what your passionate about. Watch TV, go exercise, spend time with your family, whatever makes you happy. 3. Go to bed early. When your lying in bed, think about your side projects and what you want to build. Go into detail about the code, UI, technology stack, where your going to host it. This will help you dream in code and get you excited to wake up. 4. Wake up early. I get up around 3am without an alarm clock now because after dreaming about my passion projects I'm so excited to get up and make things happen. You would be surprised how focused you can be at 3am with no distractions. In the last 6 months since I started this new me I have read over 20 books and wrote several documents for my passion project. 5. Setup the perfect development workstation. I use my 27 inch mac for development but I also have 3 laptops running Linux. I told myself I was going to setup and learn all the best productivity tools to help me code better/faster. I setup my dotfiles perfectly with all the vim plugins I wanted to use, tmux scripts, and pushed it up to github and synced it to all my workstations. It is such a rush to have everything running perfectly. 6. Start a ritual or habit and set goals. Document all your ideas for your passion projects in as much detail as possible. Go to Trello or Evernote and document everything. Include pictures, links, sound, video, whatever to help you describe your idea and get yourself motivated. I call mine my 5 year project plan even though it will only take me about a year and a half.