Motivation and negative feedback loops

Working on my own personal projects has always felt amazing. Seeing the progress in-between builds, or comparing an old version of a song to a newer one makes me realize that, yes, I am making progress. Working on them always is its own reward. And yet, I often find myself unmotivated and unwilling to work on them, sometimes even for weeks.

Why is that? If working on them is its own reward, how come I still end up not having the motivation to do just that?

This entry will cover different factors that have affected my own motivation, and some solutions with varying degrees of success I've tried out. Note that this is extremely personal, and not everything I'll be talking about applies to everyone. The solutions I'm suggesting won't work for everyone either. Also, a disclaimer : I'm an undergrad student in IT, I do not have experience in psychology and I am not a therapist. I will be writing about everything through my own lens, so take it with a grain of salt.

Progress is often invisible

A big driving factor when I work on my games or music is that, I can see the progress I've been making quite early on in the project. It's always a great feeling to see the game go from random squares to actual animated sprites, to add new features to your website in only a single hour, to finally make your melody and chord progression sound just right. But eventually, I'll hit a point where adding new things will take more and more time. This slow down usually affects me greatly, making me feel worse and worse about the project and my abilities. I never really noticed it before talking about it to someone.

I learned that this slow-down is completely normal, and that you should expect it. The features you add to your project might seem to get smaller and smaller, but really, it's more so that they're getting more and more specific. This might seem obvious to a lot of people, but I found out that making a to-do list actually helps out a lot.

Take an hour or two, and list what you need to do. Make sure only to write down tasks which you know you can complete in a single session. Once you complete a task, make sure to check it/mark it as complete. Don't delete it from your list. This way, you'll have proof of your progress, and whenever you'll add new items, or check out old ones, you'll be able to more concretely see the progress you've made.

Burnout is inevitable

I love working on my projects and tend to put in way too much time into them everyday. On top having a full time internship, I'd often end up working over 4-5 hours in the evening on them. Without really realizing it, I'd end up burning myself out in only a few days, and would just stop working on my projects in general. It is also hard to start working again after a burn out. You might say "Why don't you just not spend all your free time on your stuff?", but it's really easier said than done. When I do things I enjoy, I tend to just not pay attention to the time.

If you've looked at the repo for this blog, you'll have noticed I've been working on this site since April 2020 and only finished it around the 10th of July 2021, despite such a simple website. I've been burned out for a while, and didn't work on it for a long while. My next trick helped me a lot to actually finish this project, as well as one of my song projects.

I've been forcing myself into a routine every weekday to be productive for an hour. Nothing more, nothing less. I just set two reminders for it, one to remind me to start, and another to remind me to stop. It prevents me from overworking myself, and by spreading out my efforts like this, I don't get burned out as easily. I also ended up looking forward to my scheduled timeslots. It's a simple enough trick, and with it, I actually manage to keep my motivation up for multiple weeks in a row. So if this can help anyone else, I'll be glad.

Negative feedback loops

This is a problem I often find myself facing, which I really don't have an answer for sadly. I'll stop working on my projects because I'm feeling bad, and I'll feel worse since I'm not being productive. It's just an awful situation, which I still don't know how to get past most of the time. Usually, weekends will bring a reset, but when they don't, I'll try playing a game or two, or watch a show, and eventually it'll go away. Usually, knowing when I'm in such a feedback loop and talking about it with someone will help getting past it.

After getting past it, I usually go back to my "be productive for an hour every weekday" routine, and it doesn't come back in a while. There's really no avoiding it for me, so identifying quickly when it happens, and cooling myself down as soon as possible helps a lot.

Finishing projects

Nothing feels better than finally completing a project you've been working on for a while. Ever since I finished one of my song projects, I felt better working on my website, and ended up finishing that one as well. I realize now that working endlessly on the same project really doesn't help with motivation. Mixing in some smaller or shorter projects which I know I can finish in not too many hours will help greatly in the future.