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I'm really terrible at managing personal projects. I'm often procrastinating (I guess you could say I put the 'pro' in that word) or lacking motivation. I rarely complete projects because I always start something new and forget about the other projects. I have had a Sublime Text window minimised and related browser tabs opened for a year now and haven't touched it in months. I'll get around to it some day.
Some of these projects could be making a few dollars (hopefully more) if I complete them.
Has anyone got any tips to help me stop procrastinating and motivate myself?

Comments
  • 1
    I regularly do a mini and informal "show and tell" for side projects with a few people I work with. Find other people who are excited about creating stuff. When you lose the spark on a project, their excitement may help you stay focused.

    It's worked well for me... I have about 20 side projects that I started and none of them are finished... But since we started doing this little meet up, I've been working on the same project for about a month and I'm almost ready for beta! (It's almost 2am here, so I may wait until tomorrow and just do a quick once over before I embarrass myself)
  • 2
    @lreading it definitely helps when someone is interested and that motivates me. A high school teacher and his wife (who also teaches) are both interested in technology and they are interested in some projects that I work on and ideas that I have. I dropped out of high school last year, just before starting year 12 because I couldn't cope with it. I am now doing work experience there 2 days a week to help fix computer problems and stuff, so I still see them. A couple of days ago, they gave me an iPhone 4 in return for all my computer help over the past few years, so now I have a real device to test apps on. 😃
    The problem is that in all my spare time, I'm not really doing much and I don't have many friends who are interested enough in programming. I was thinking about starting up a group for young people interested in programming at my local library, but I'm not sure where to start with that.
  • 1
    You could see if there's any meetups in your area, too. The devrant community is pretty supportive of side projects as well. (tag: mystartup)

    Maybe one of the 237 people who post that they want to program but have no ideas will see this and make a platform to curate a community of people working on start ups? Lol
  • 2
    also worth noting having a system to keep track of progress... asana, trello... I bought a licence for jira because I enjoy pain, etc.
  • 2
    @lreading there's unlikely to be any meetups in this town. 😂
    The only kind of meetup around here that I can think of is the one for teaching old people to use computers.
  • 1
    @lreading thanks, I'll check those out!
  • 1
    @georgelynch had an idea:
    "I figured we could create a slack team and do a weekly check in with something like "join me" in case we need to screen share. We will keep the meeting to 15 minutes and if side discussions develop, those involved can stay online and discuss, pretty much like a daily standup. I have one other guy that is interested. I can be reached at dtinsley91@gmail.com"

    So maybe you can consider that
  • 2
    I have set up a slack team called devdailystandup for those needing encouragement to stay on track with their one person projects. I have added the Devrant slack bot. This group will be for freelancers, students, learners... Who need some support to keep complete their projects or learning. We will do daily stand ups online each day and encourage each other. I Contact me if you want to be added to the team. The group will kick off July 5th.
  • 0
    @georgelynch Great! You just need my email for Slack, right?
  • 0
    @nathanprocks yes. Will the one from your profile work for you?
  • 0
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