How do you motivate yourselves to work on side projects? like I just wanna sit on my ass play video games

I wish I knew how I can convert my motivation to game to study better or work on side projects but I don't have the secret recipe.

For me, it was having a good friend in need.

He was making a game && needed some help w/ it, so he reached out to me.

Try to make something for the game or a tool to train your game skills.

Please tell me when you have figured it out.

when I found programming I thought programming was the ultimate video game and it actually ruined video games for me

the amount of self expression in code, how much you can build / the degrees of creative freedom, and how complex and difficult you can make the "game" for yourself is just nowhere near what video games can anticipate to give you

For me, setting a timer/alarm has been the most helpful to get out of the "just one more game" mindset or if you're really not feeling, it doing it inverse, set a timer or alarm for the study side project. Also slapping all options I'd like to do at some point on here: https://wheelofnames.com/ (excluding procrastination stuff) if I really don't want to do an option I'll skip it, it breaks the "I don't know which thing I want to do" cycle

If you don’t do the side project that earns you money, you will work for the rest of your life. Simple as that

you mean you don't get overwhelmed by a sense of your own utter insignificance whenever you spend your free time in an uncreative way?

For me, side projects are fun.

Perhaps, key is doing low effort side projects. Time consuming, large, hard side projects aren't fun.

And publishing it to people, or putting it on your website is fun. Without this, I guess there is no point.

@kanyewest how do you like publishing to people or even talking to people tho

By the way, my motivation thing works for me astonishingly well. Without an active side project, I feel like the biggest loser in the world. I _have_ to have a good side project to get much needed dopamine. Because I'm bipolar, I can use every bit of dopamine I can have.

My current side project is so fucking amazing in every single aspect that y'all will shit your pants when you see it. The design, the code, the content, everything is perfect. Truly my magnum opus.

There are two parts to it: free one and paid one. Free one is 100% ready. Paid one is like 30% ready, so yeah, I'm really doing it and not just talking about doing it.

@jestdotty I just put it on the app store, and add it to my projects list on my website

I don't know anything about marketing and once I put something on show HN, it had 0 comments 0 likes. But marketing seems to be really important.

> How do you motivate yourselves to work on side projects?

It's easy, I don't.

@Jabb03 Welcome to the club 🤝

@kiki this is imto the worst approach ever. you grow a side project from a hobby. then your hobby turns into another job. suddenly, you realize you're working two jobs and your former hobby no longer has to rest and relaxation purpose it had earlier.

the stuff i loved doing before is now a chore just because i was stupid enough and agreed to turn it into a side-project. now, it's just another "work"

@qwwerty first, I'm doing it all alone, as I always do.

Second, I deeply believe that some software projects can just be “done”. I never understood it when companies like Slack were cramming more and more features into their products, probably motivated by nothing but fear of the competition. I think that if they fire everyone in the engineering dept. but one guy who will be applying security patches, their market share won't suffer long term.

For my project, I've specifically chosen a trivial and highly utilitarian scope that anyone can tackle, just to outdo everyone in UI/UX and reap my MRR forever, all alone. My product is boring. The business model and the overall spirit here is that of pushover.net and rsync.net, not google or facebook. A super-stable, super-inert whale entirely dominating a very specific narrow niche.

I've already done one free project that I didn't touch for 4 years now, and it still gets crazy usage.

@qwwerty yes, I believe that IN CERTAIN NICHES you can just do a good product once and monetize it forever through subscription, without ever touching the codebase again (aside from merging dependabot's requests).

Imagine a product that never changes, just exists in the background, non-excitingly earning one person their living. That's my end goal.

@qwwerty btw, looking forward to seeing your side project! Really curious at this point

@qwwerty I'll second what @kiki said.

Maybe find a smaller side project you think you can finish in a week and see how long it will actually take.

On the software being "done" part, I had a (minecraft server) bucket plugin that would allow you to build in creative, it would track what you placed (and the order) and when you were done you could collect them in survival and dump the items in a chest for it to place them. If it wasn't for the many migrations making me lose my I'd still have permanent curse forge premium. It took me less than a month to make, and I haven't touched it since, still one of the proudest projects of my youth

@BordedDev wow! congrats!