Motivating have-way-through release of a portion of your project

A suggestion for the paralyzed, demotivated or anxious Indie Hacker: when I had already worked on my side project for months and still had months to go with all the work from my day job, I felt I’d never finish. Anxious about having invested so much time already without any real reward, I pulled out part of my codebase and released it as an open-source package. First, it was a thrill to release something (getting a glimpse of what it would feel like with my actual product) and second, seeing it being downloaded continuously as well as it gaining some stars on GitHub motivated me a ton during the months left with the real deal. Highly recommend it!

The package is API Blueprint Docs - An API Blueprint Renderer for Laravel
https://github.com/M165437/laravel-blueprint-docs

Have you done something similar to motivate yourself / overcome anxiety?