I've been working on an open-source project on GitHub for more than a year. It's not the kind of project that will ever bring me income obviously and it's not a success story, but I can relate to many of the challenges involved in building any kind of project.
The first problem is what happens after the novelty is gone. The Pareto principle applies, the last 20% of work needed to be done being the hardest. And we tend to start working on something, satisfy our initial urge and then move on. Well, a year and a half later I'm still working on it, even though I've had pauses that lasted for weeks or even months. For me the recipe is finding something that is worth solving. And given that my library was born out of necessities at work, plus a couple of users that started using my library, I felt enough responsibility to proceed. My library also has competition, but every time I've looked at the competition, I remember the very good reasons I've had for starting my own thing. And I'm now marching towards a 1.0 release that will be in good shape and provide API stability for some time. But now I'm feeling the second problem - how to market it, how to scale the development process and so on. I know that I've got something good on my hands, but I don't know how to convince others.
But the biggest problem is that this project is a love child. My problem won't be that I lack the motivation or focus to work on it, because I do, finding the focus necessary is effortless when you really want to work on something. No, my problem will be to let go of this project if the alternatives will evolve to be better.
Back to your question, for immediate advice - I'm the kind of individual for which time management techniques never helped, ever, as my problems are usually of inspiration and finding the necessary motivation. On motivation, having a child to feed surely helps :-)
But I can say that when I'm getting in "the zone" I'm 10 times more productive and when I get there, I tend to stay there for as much as possible, as getting in that zone is hard. And that means I stop my IM, I put my phone on silent (with my wife added as an exception) and I play music. Music helps me a lot, because I need background noise to keep my mind from wondering off. Also, I try to have a healthy sleep cycle and weekends are always for fun and relaxation. Rules like that can keep you from burning out.
>>> I've had pauses that lasted for weeks or even months. For me the recipe is finding something that is worth solving.
I can totally relate to that. Sometimes I feel that ok, this project is much more complicated than I expected, or maybe it's not that interesting really. Should I abandon it?
So I try to honestly answer to myself, am I just being lazy right now, or is it for real? I find it quite important to distinguish between these two.
If you are just feeling a bit lazy, just try to fix some simple bug, or update readme, something small like that. It can do wonders. Usually, opening the IDE and starting to write the first line of code is the hardest part :) even if you can't be bothered to do anything that night, that's cool. Don't be too harsh on yourself.
But sometimes, you genuinely lose interest in the project. In that case, I think it's fine to just quit (assuming it's a side project which isn't bringing any income and it never will, that kind of stuff). There's no point to push yourself too hard, it's too likely that the product will end up being a bit crappy since you've lost the interest, and you won't have much fun (which often is the top priority) either.
The first problem is what happens after the novelty is gone. The Pareto principle applies, the last 20% of work needed to be done being the hardest. And we tend to start working on something, satisfy our initial urge and then move on. Well, a year and a half later I'm still working on it, even though I've had pauses that lasted for weeks or even months. For me the recipe is finding something that is worth solving. And given that my library was born out of necessities at work, plus a couple of users that started using my library, I felt enough responsibility to proceed. My library also has competition, but every time I've looked at the competition, I remember the very good reasons I've had for starting my own thing. And I'm now marching towards a 1.0 release that will be in good shape and provide API stability for some time. But now I'm feeling the second problem - how to market it, how to scale the development process and so on. I know that I've got something good on my hands, but I don't know how to convince others.
But the biggest problem is that this project is a love child. My problem won't be that I lack the motivation or focus to work on it, because I do, finding the focus necessary is effortless when you really want to work on something. No, my problem will be to let go of this project if the alternatives will evolve to be better.
Back to your question, for immediate advice - I'm the kind of individual for which time management techniques never helped, ever, as my problems are usually of inspiration and finding the necessary motivation. On motivation, having a child to feed surely helps :-)
But I can say that when I'm getting in "the zone" I'm 10 times more productive and when I get there, I tend to stay there for as much as possible, as getting in that zone is hard. And that means I stop my IM, I put my phone on silent (with my wife added as an exception) and I play music. Music helps me a lot, because I need background noise to keep my mind from wondering off. Also, I try to have a healthy sleep cycle and weekends are always for fun and relaxation. Rules like that can keep you from burning out.