How do you find energy for side projects?

Oh! That's a weird question for me. I usually ask myself: how do I find energy for my primary job (freelance developer)?

My life is a constellation of side projects. Most times they are just experiments but sometimes they become my first source of revenue.

My main hints:

• break your project in small steps. That way you can really see your progress day after day.
• alternate funny/interesting tasks with the boring ones
• do boring tasks as first, that way you can see the funny/interesting ones as a reward

Hope it can help!
Diego

Building on @Diego's excellent answer since I'm obsessed with this topic.

One important difference between salary work and personal projects is how clear the goals are. At your day job you probably have incredibly well-defined responsibilities: get to work at time N; report on yesterday's progress and today's deliverables in a stand-up meeting; deliver on your tasks by the deadline, etc.

Personal projects are different. The goals come from you. And if you don't have a lot of practice or guidance in defining, assessing, pivoting on, and holding yourself to account for goals, psychological pain will ensue.

In a lot of cases, it's only once you create a clear set of action items that your energy systems can fire up and send you on your way. And in general, the best way to do this is by dividing and conquering — successively breaking your next steps down into smaller and smaller chunks until they're clear and actionable.

Think of it this way: energy begets action, but action also begets energy. Making even trivial daily progress will prompt little dopamine hits of excitement. This excitement can motivate you to push for greater daily progress. And so on and so forth in a flywheel of reciprocal feedback.

An entire book could be written on this. In fact, countless books that touch/focus on this [1][2][3][4] have already been written. But it's premature of me to assume your main difficulty is in starting small enough, so I'll wrap this up here.

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[1] https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity/dp/0142000280

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/dp/1455586692

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Habits-Highly-Effective-People-Powerful-ebook

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Personal-MBA-Master-Art-Business/dp/1591845572

I occasionally experience this and find it helps not to be harsh on myself if I'm not motivated. I try two things (in this order) when I recognize I am feeling demotivated.

1. Look at my task list (I list everything I need to do for my business, not just coding tasks) and identify one item that I feel like doing. As a guide, I normally pick something small.

2. Once I have decided something on point 1, I make myself commit to doing something for 30 minutes. After this 30 minutes, if I still don't feel like working on my side project, I just take time off from it that day and come back to it the next day. Normally, once I get going and do the 30 minutes, I can have a harder time stopping, but I do experience days when I get to the 30 minutes and I shut down.

The key point is that if I don't feel like working on my project/business that day, that is not a problem.

It helps to actually like whatever you're working on. To me that's like 35%. Then the rest is basic discipline stuff. If you do anything consistently for long enough it will just become easy. Push pass your feelings first just to see what its like.

Can you clarify what you mean when you say you are both "unmotivated" but also "inspired"? That seems a little contradictory to me as inspiration can be a form of motivation. Perhaps this could mean one of a couple things:

1. You're really inspired to work on your side project but something is holding you back (e.g. you don't know what to do or work on, or the project seems too overwhelming, or you're too tired after doing your primary job, or you're worried your project won't be good enough).
2. You really want to have a side project, but the actual thing you're working on isn't actually inspiring or motivating.

And when you say that you need to find energy, do you mean that you're actually feeling tired (e.g. after a long day's work, I'm too tired to work on my side project)?

My most recent attempt at building my side-project (in some form) is my third one. Thankfully it was successful! What helped me as the following:

1. Cutting scope and being creative about it. For example, I still haven't implemented Search into my journalling app because no one needs it immediately at launch.
2. Getting every aspect of the MVP defined in Figma before I built it and break it down into smaller tasks.
3. Working every night no matter what. Since I broke down everything into tasks in step (2), I could easily pull a task appropriate for the amount of time I had available to me. Some nights I only worked 20 minutes because I came home late, but that's fine.

Step (3) is the most important. Steps (1) and (2) just enabled it to happen more effectively.

That said, my real hack was reserving the hours of 12am to 2am to work on the side-project. For some strange reason, I rarely had plans after midnight especially on weekdays, so it was easier to routinely get work done. The danger there is that occasionally I would stay up to 3 or 4am because I got into the zone while working. Definitely not healthy! I stopped doing that since I did my stealth launch.

At the end of everyday. Find somethings you did that wasn't worth the time. Stop them and do the work

I find that two things work best for me: treating my side projects like work projects (excuses that would be lame at work should be lame for yourself too), and having non-zero days.

I got bored of postponing major chunks of my projects, so I started committing to doing one little thing per day. Even as small as sending one email. The thing that gets me is that once I set time aside to do that one small thing, I got the ball rolling and I accomplish a lot more.