Do you all lack in motivation like I did?

I spend last year building a "biggish" product that went no where and that I did not particularly love. The coding became painful and the progress very slow, until it stopped. We all know this story. Despite its history, I plan to invest some more time on it but for now let's just say I got burned enough...

After halting the development of the product, I went through a depressing phase where I had no motivation/passion/interest to build anything. I could care less about it. I spend my evenings after work playing games or watching netflix. Despite all of this, like many of you, the idea off build something kept knocking at the back of my mind but with what happened last year, I told myself that I would not build something that I don't love, at least partially. Since I had no idea that I was particularly interested in, I kept watching movies.

On evening, something came up. While thinking about life, I realised that I take a bunch of notes during meetings that I end up losing or doing nothing with. This thought led me to the (not particularly) brilliant idea to build something to fix that problem (in a eat your own dog food fashion) and so I started working on MeetingCompass (the name is not final, I'll hunt for domains soon!!). I might not be in love with the idea but I do like it quite a bunch and it's something that will be for me at first at then for others. I think it's a nice trade-off.

I also realised that during last year's endeavour, I was putting too much pressure on myself and then started feeling bad about not working. This time I decided to do things differently. Instead of doing a sprint, I'm doing a marathon. Happily for me, the mvp will be small, so it's a short marathon. So now, I work when I fill like it and I play with my friends or watch movies when I don't.

Lastly, a couple of weeks before starting, I was reading an article about ADHD. I was reading about the topic because I believe to have a light form of ADHD (I might need to check this out properly one day, but since it does not really impact my life, it's ok to ignore it). While I was reading the article, the author stated that one of the things that motivates him is to work on something that he can show to others. It made sense, and so, I decided to try this and build my project in public and see what happens. You can follow my journey on twitter:

I'm quite happy if you read this far but I have a confession to make. I'm not really writing this for you but for me as a way to collection my thoughts and feelings. It might be too soon to say that this project is a success but for now, I don't lack motivation, not a tiny bit, and this is what I value:

• working on something I like;
• working on something for me but also others;
• building slow, why the rush?
• building in public;

I hope you enjoyed this post. I'd be happy to read your thoughts about it.