I totally relate to the above, the purpose, the drive, it's there until you finish the project or your stuck doing the last 20% which ends up being half the work. You stop and you think why am I doing this, am I just building tools to build them. Start to feel like your grasping for nothing. Then you burn out, go do something crazy for 1-2 weeks come back and like yeah lets start a new project! haha
This sounds very familiar to me. Usually after a month or so of doing that I feel a mild burnout and cannot touch the project for a long period after that, if at all.
Needless to say, this is not a very good strategy to build a healthy project in the long run.
I've found myself stuck in that endless cycle for years. I find myself highly motivated for the first few weeks, thinking about a future where I can work on this full time.
As the project shapes up, I lose interest and start to doubt my idea, wondering why people would ever pay for this. Eventually I work on it less and less until one day I decide to not work on it anymore.
I've started countless projects all with a wave of optimism on how its going to be different this time, how this will be the side project that earns me enough recurring revenue to leave my job and start making things I want to build full time, but I never can finish them.
I am in awe at people who can work on things for 4+ years without getting large scale feedback or revenue from them. My attention span for a side project lasts a month at most.
If I spend too long on a project that I just want to finish, I generally find myself looking at other more interesting projects and working a little on them.
Sometimes this is being lazy but sometimes you just need the change to get back on track with your mundane project.
I have similar problems in that I start a lot of projects but only 'finish' some - in that they find some natural resting point. In my job I grind but for work that is just for me I stop when I stop having fun which seems fairly normal.
I am with you on this one. I, for my part, cannot stop unless I finish some logical subset of the work. Leaving the work incomplete or with bugs would make me sleep worse, and I would spend lots of time the next day trying to understand what I was trying to achieve. Even more so in hobby projects, where I might come back in a couple of days or weeks.
What I do, though, is leaving a TODO where I think I need to continue the next time. Works wonders for me.
In the end, I think it is about leaving some kind of an "anchor", but the exact kind depends on your personality I guess.
I feel the same way, although, I usually have spurts, where I will work really hard on a side project for a few days, maybe even a week, but end up burning myself out when it's combined with work. You're not alone.
Interesting. I am the polar opposite of this. New things invigorate me, and I can often slam through a project to 90% but it takes me days or sometimes weeks to motivate myself to do the last 10%.
Once I can convince myself and start just doing it, I can usually get that done quick too, but there's a mental barrier of high difficulty to overcome first, and I'm compelled to be doing something new instead.
I find I suffer from a similar problem. For me I figure the reasoning is based in learning potential; at the beginning of a project or piece of software you have the most to learn. As the project continues you begin to do more and learn less, and since I enjoy learning new things a lot I find myself less motivated to continue and more enthused to start something else (which also will not get finished).
It's a vicious cycle of incomplete work and hyper-learning, but I'm mostly okay with that.
I appreciate many of the comments here. I don’t feel alone.
I’ve been working on something for a couple years (off and on) and some days/weeks/months my motivation takes a nose dive to the point where I stop work completely. Eventually I get back into it but one of these days, I might drop it completely.
For me making something is like a drug. I have a lot of fun working on it and even immersing myself but after a while the fun runs out. If I finish what I am working on I feel awesome then almost immediately sad. Then I have to find something else.
I’m in a similar boat. For me, I think it’s burnout. If I have a week+ off of work, I’ll start to get the itch to start a project, but with work the way it is, I hardly even touch my home computer anymore.
I have a lot of things I started during those weeks off that never really make it off the ground, because the interest falls to 0 the second work starts back up.
Yeah, I find myself starting new things all the time and never finishing most of them. I've used a WIP limit to try to force myself to finish or explicitly dump projects.
Oh god this almost echoes my last dozen projects exactly. I get too fixated daydreaming on the end result I suppose. I also lose interest if I see someone else working on something much more interesting.
At any one time I'd have a dozen projects all being worked on, none of them ever being finished. As I got older I made a rule never to start a new project until the old project is finished.
As I've switched, I've noticed the motivations have changed. The last 20% of any project is un-fun work. All the excitement is gone and all that is left is tedium. This is when your eyes start wandering to other projects.
It's addiction. You are addicted to the fun part, and when it's no longer fun you start looking for you fix somewhere else. The trick is to change your addiction. Force yourself to finish a project. Get addicted to the sense of accomplishment instead of being addicted to learning something new and exciting. If you only care about the learning and not the doing, you'll end up reading wikipedia all day, every day.
I have the same problem with my personal projects. I have one project I've been in a "groove" on for several months, and now that it is close to complete I'm having an existential crisis, wondering what the point of the project was in the first place.
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