Optional

A friend asked me about how I manage personal projects. Stuff like learning skills and building small apps. I don't have all the answers. But I did start out struggling with this a lot and have since reached a point where I do have more peace of mind and am happier with how I'm managing my efforts.

To get a better picture of what kinds of project I'm talking about here, I'll describe the life cycle of an archetypal successful project. Successful, because it actually reaches the end. A failed project may fail at any one step along the way.

1. Some form of inspiration or motivation strikes!
2. You gather the prerequisites for the projects. This may be tools, material and/or resources, either for the aim of the project itself, or for the process of the project.
3. You formulate a plan, define a process, or just start and establish the plan and process while executing them.
4. You accomplish a result. This may mark the end of the project, or it is just one milestone, or one of many results that you hope to achieve as part of this project.

Anything missing? Sure, some people will quote me some stuff like “But projects that don't have goals are just hobbies!” and “If your project doesn't have a deadlines that means it's okay to never do it!“. But no time to think about that now! Let's just ignore that and dive right in!

Inspiration And Motivation

There's two kinds of inspiration: You can be inspired by something or inspired to do something. I'll just call the latter motivation and the former inspiration. Inspiration and motivation are often the very first things that start us off on our projects. So we have to know how to effectively work with these two kinds of sparks.

Inspiration

Being inspired (by something) means we found something that resonates with us deeply. Maybe it is a piece of art that has made us feel a way that we want to make others feel with our own art. Maybe we encounter a problem that we feel well situated to tackle. But without also being motivated (to act) we can't do much with this inspiration.

As such it is best to collect these sources of inspiration for when we need them. Capturing them should serve us two functions: Providing peace, and providing future inspiration.

Because stumbling upon inspiration often coincides with some burst of emotion we need to deal with this emotion. Of course, if it's a big emotion—like us breaking down crying at the cinema—then we first finish that in a way that's healthy to us. But the remaining little excitement that's got us itching in our fingertips to do something should be quieted for now. Otherwise we just jump from one thing to the next.

The second goal, “providing future inspiration,” just means that this filing away should be done in a manner as to possibly resurface the inspiration later. At a future time—maybe one where we are motivated without inspiration, we can look at our personal little archive of inspiration and find just the thing to work on.

Okay, but “HOW do you capture your inspiration?” I hear you scream. Well, just do what works for you. Maybe you like a physical journal where you write with fancy and colourful gel pens. Maybe you like to dump everything into some notes app. Or you are often inspired by visuals and photograph them all so they show up in your phone's gallery. I have some special formatting with which I place these things into my Obsidian vault.

If you already have some place where you save your favorite quotes, images and film snippets you might think that you're done here. But I want you to take a moment and think whether this place of yours truly serves both purposes I defined above. It probably does provide peace of mind, but does it also resurface old inspiration?

Inspiration is such a quirky little thing that you don't need an advanced database and tagging system to always be able to retrieve some exact piece from years ago. Serendipity is often enough. It can even lead to interesting crossover when two seemingly disconnected pieces collide. If you collect a lot of stuff as digital pictures, you might think about getting one of those digital picture frames and having your inspirations be shuffled on there. If you write in a journal, you could think about getting a 5 lines journal where you are reminded of what you wrote exactly one, two, (..), and five years ago. Even without wanting to work on projects it is enriching to shape your environment in a way that continuously inspires you.

Motivation

Motivation often coincides with inspiration. When inspiration makes us dream of a goal we want to achieve, we often also feel an impulse to start working on that goal. But motivation will almost certainly run out somewhere along the way. Especially if the goal is big and far away motivation can be at its cruellest: We invest a lot of energy into the foundation of this amazing big thing and after a couple of weeks when motivation runs out we realize that we haven't achieved anything at all. This isn't even a milestone worth preserving because in all our lifetime we will never be able to complete this project and reach the goal that so inspired and motivated us.

What are we to do then? The r/GetMotivated subreddit has a rival subreddit called r/GetDisciplined. Is the answer to not count on motivation (meaning to want to put in the effort), but instead to place our bets on discipline (meaning to force ourselves to put in the effort)? Wait a minute—”forcing ourselves” sounds pretty bad here. I thought we wanted to have some fun working on our personal projects!

Well, you might say, maybe I just worded it badly. You might point out that we can just say that disciplining ourselves is about using some tricks of psychology to get ourselves to do what we actually already want to do. Our long-term-planning part of the brain has picked out a goal and now we have to dangle a carrot in front of our short-term-gratification part of the brain to get it to comply. And maybe also use a bit of the stick. Some delayed gratification, some pomodoros, building a couple habits, etc.

Hm, that does indeed sound a bit nicer. But to be quite honest with you, it's not for me. Instead, I try to bring these two parts of my brain into better alignment. And I can tell you, when your short-term-gratification part of the brain simply wants to work on a project, it's amazing. To get there we run a two-pronged attack: On one side we try to remove bad motivation and on the other we try to transform bad motivation into good motivation.

Deleting your social media should give you back about 2 hours per day which your brain will want to use to do some stuff. Spend that time cutting your short film. Deleting Netflix from your phone could free up some time that you can spend sketching out your next airbrush piece. But I want to make one thing crystal clear:

I am not advocating to replace your favorite downtime activities with hustle. Instead, I want you to do a fun activity you like instead of a convenient activity you don't actually like.

If your “relaxing activity” after a tough day at work is 3 hours of tv, it isn't actually a relaxing activity. It's convenient to get into, but it is obviously not recharging you. Instead, if the work you need to recover from was predominantly mentally straining, you might try some physical activity like going for a walk, or even yoga or a workout session. Or just sitting on a bench peoplewatching. After 30 to 90 minutes of that you might be surprised how energized you find yourself again, ready to finish constructing that crossword puzzle of yours.

This all was on the topic of removing bad motivation (or, more accurately, bad habits). On the topic of turning bad motivation into good motivation I will say this: If there's some things that you just like too much for you to quit, then turn these into productive activities. If you just can't quit listening to podcasts then find a way to do something with that. I love movies, so I take every film as an opportunity to look for interesting plot or character ideas that I can recycle in my own storytelling.

Again, don't turn your fun hobbies into stressful obligations for your projects. Even after adding your ulterior motive to your activity it should remain fun and enriching. If your approach to broaden the gain from your activity stresses you out, immediately drop that approach.

Okay, that's all on the topic of motivation, I think. What's with that look on your face? You don't seem convinced yet. Oh, you think I haven't given you all the tools to motivate yourself to follow through with learning a new language? All I did was say that motivation is fleeting and discipline is some productivity-cult mumbo-jumbo?

Look, I don't have the answer on how to always make that short-term-gratification part of your brain roll over and get with it. But I have found that through connecting with that part of myself and being okay with the conflict between that part and the long-term-planning part I have become much more at peace. And in the end I still do stuff and finish projects. Without ever forcing myself, just by wanting and then doing.

That's all, okay? I know you want more, and you want it now. Connect with that part of yourself. Explore it and make peace with it. Not by giving it what it wants, but by accepting that while it would be nice, it won't happen. And I do promise to make a couple more references to motivation in the next sections as well, okay? Okay.

Prerequisites

As explained in the introduction, I define prerequisites as the tools and materials that you (can) collect at the beginning of your project. They might be necessary for the finished project (like the bottle for your bottle terrarium) or they just might be the explanation based on which you work on your project (like the python guide helping you script a Mastodon bot that posts the “Thursday. What a concept.” still).

Sometimes, coming across these resources is the first step in a project. They are the thing that first inspires you to do that project. Sometimes you come across a resource that, even though you don't want to do that project, is so good that you have to save it somewhere. Just like with inspiration before, do it! Save it. Again, in a way that gives you peace of mind, but also in a way that will help in future.

With resources, this second requirement (resurfacing) looks a little different though. For an inspiration it's okay to resurface somewhat randomly. A resource on the other hand needs to resurface exactly when you need it. This could mean placing these resources where you are likely to look when beginning work on a project related to them. Like placing crafting materials on your workbench. Or placing links to the software libraries you want to use for a project in that project's readme file.

It could instead (or additionally) mean to file the resources away in such a manner that you will be able to find them again when you need them. Some people manage to place color-coded book tabs in every book they read. Others have a bunch of binders where they collect articles on topics. Online you can, of course, bookmark things you come across. Or throw them into Pocket, Wallabag, Readwise, and tag them. Everyone is different and will find a different way to do it.

There are four things to watch out for here: Over-collecting (broadly and narrowly), over-organizing, and losing things.

With “over-collecting broadly” I'm referring to the practice of saving everything that “might be useful someday.” Spend some time listening inward. Yes, that's a great guide on how to do a hammer-on, but you don't own a guitar and never have. Do you really need to save this for a “later” that we both know will never come?

“Over-collecting narrowly” is the same thing, but this time you do own a guitar. And you already have 153 bookmarks of cool sites to practice and you found 14 books with guitar tabs on a flea market. And you just DuckDuckWent “top 50 guides to learn the guitar”. If this is all hitting close to home, let me assure you that I'm not saying this to bully you. I've done this myself. A lot. But at some point it's enough. At some point you have to actually read one of those articles, you have to pick up your guitar and follow along with a tutorial. Or you have to give up the dream of playing guitar and make “putting together a collection of resources on guitar playing” your project.

“Over-organizing” and “losing things” are obviously two opposite ends of a spectrum. If you throw all resources you come across into one big heap, you will lose things. If you spend time tagging everything to hell and filing it into folders and emailing them to yourself scheduled with spaced repetition to memorize the existence of the resource, you are again becoming an archivist instead of somebody actually doing the thing.

Finding the right balance of how much to annotate the resources you find is a skill learned with practice. And part of that practice requires you to retrieve your filed-away resources, which you can only do when you have stopped over-collecting and started actually working on your projects. It's tough the first couple of times, but it will become a virtuous cycle: The better this system works, the more fun it is to use, the better it works.

As I've never personally experienced “under-collecting” or not being able to find at least some satisfactory resources for my needs I can't talk to that and will just move on.

Plan and Process

We have some idea of what we want to do. We have all the stuff that we need to do it. And we hopefully have some motivation to follow through. But how do we do it? That's where our plan and process come in.

The plan is an overview of the steps that need to be taken to reach our goal. Or maybe it's just a sketch of the goal. I'm not being too precise here.

The process, on the other hand, is the way we approach the project. It's the way we make time for it, the way we work through our plan and the way we distribute our efforts.

Plan

What a plan should look like is really dependent on the project. More complicated or complex projects should probably have some documented plan, even just to prevent you from starting from scratch every time. Projects that will probably take a long time should also have some documentation. For example, if you were trying to watch every Best Picture winning film it'd probably be helpful to keep track of what you already own and what you've already seen to make it easier to continue after a break. On the other hand, when you're doing a jigsaw puzzle it's probably keeping enough track of itself.

A thing to watch out for, is to not lose yourself in the planning. Certain kinds of people (e.g. me) can easily get lost in thinking high-level and just sketching out every corner of an idea without ever actually taking a step to implement that idea. In these cases it might be helpful to remind yourself that Design is Iteration and maybe you should just build an imperfect first version. Or try to create some kind of prototype (which is just a fancy word for what I just said).

“Sure!”, I hear you say, “But this advice can't be applied to my particular project! I'm doing something without a tangible result, something which can't prototyped. Something like learning a new skill.” First of all, I'd ask you what exactly it is that you are planning then and why you haven't started yet.

I suspect that the thing you are planning is the way you will go about your project. You might be scheduling practice sessions, planning out which courses to start with and what material to read when. In that case I'd advise you to prototype your plan. Try a week with your schedule and see how that fits. Read the first articles in that series and see if they are fit for your level. Stop procrastaplanning!

Process

Much more important than planning, in my eyes, is the process. A process can be planned and thought about, but, again, you should be enacting and living it.

What works for me is something you probably have already gathered from the section on motivation: I don't force myself to do anything. Even though it's common to have a regular release schedule for podcasts and blogs, I don't adhere to one with my own writing or podcast.

Is that hurting my reach? Could I gain more readers and listeners if I had a regular schedule? Could I even turn this into a side hustle and make some money? Yeah, maybe. But this is my personal side project. Not my job. Not my hustle. This should be fun, not “growing KPI”, “delivering value” or “satisfying stakeholders”.

I do try to make my process easy. I have templates for common tasks and have a cheat sheet for deploying new web-apps. I also don't sweat it when I don't finish something. Even before I started working on my Lines and Veils app I've had a feature in mind that'd be cool to have. And now, almost two years later I still haven't added it. Does that mean I will never add it? No, actually. I often go back to some of my older stuff and just keep tinkering with it. Should I have waited with publishing the app because it's not feature complete? That's a “no” as well. I've been able to get great use out of what is there already. I've also gotten feedback from other people that enjoyed using it. And every time I use it I am reminded of the feature I'd like to add. And every time my motivation builds. All until one day, when I will finally add it. No need to rush.

Keeping work on my projects optional has greatly reduced the stress I used to feel around them. Making it super easy to dip in and out of projects at all different stages of completion means that even when I am stuck at (or just sick of) one thing I can move on to another. And that other thing is still some cool project of mine that I want to work on. And with time, that leads to results.

Result and Milestone

Much of what could be said here, I have already mentioned in previous sections. I'll just quickly reiterate those points, before moving on to one last new one.

Setting too big a goal will lead to quickly running out of motivation. Desired results should thus be set small. If you still want to dream big, you can instead set a small milestone goal while still telling yourself that you will one day reach that big and lofty dream goal of yours.

In general, it is helpful to have milestones or intermediate results, as this helps with motivation and planning (“Design is Iteration”). It also helps with process, because returning after a break is easier when you can just build on some existing result, rather than finding your way back into the middle of a mess.

Lastly, if you love working on a project, you might just set new goals and achieve results that you didn't even set or expect at the beginning. You might start by writing a couple of short stories and find yourself with a whole anthology eBook on your hands at the end! And then you toy with the idea of also turning that into an audiobook. And you never actually started with that, but the idea keeps returning to you and you just know that you will do that one day. And it won't be a thing you planned, nor a thing you forced yourself to do. It will just be the thing you wanted to do so bad that you just couldn't not do it.

___ Reach out via Mastodon @Optional@dice.camp or shoot me an email