How do I trick my brain into completing a project? I’m making an app that shows which voice actor plays a character in the movie and what other movies they act in. It’s useful for me personally but I feel like I’m making something that’s been done numerous times over and I lost the momentum because I’m on vacation with my family now. I ran into some problems with the project too and getting help takes a ton of time so it’s disrupting the rythm too. I really have to put at least 2-3 projects like this for a portfolio;_;
i read this somewhere, and i can’t recall where now, but it anecdotally feels very true:
as soon as you tell someone about something you’re working on but haven’t finished yet, you get a premature dopamine hit. for some reason, that messes with the reward centre in your brain and makes it less likely to actually finish the fucking thing, like you’ve already sucked the juice out leaving an empty husk. so, my secret to finishing programming side projects has been to tell no one of them until they’re ready. this is heavily paraphrased, i know nothing.
“No interesting project is ever finished.”
Got that one from my CS professors and it’s always rung true. So I just plan to get interrupted and try to make it easy to jump back in after I lose focus for a while. And the key to that is documentation.
I can go back to a project I left unfinished weeks or months ago and say, okay, here’s where I left off and here’s all the information I need about these functions and modules.
Does the “not-ending” apply to really small things though? I think mine can have an end, it’s more of a demonstration than a serious thing.
Am a software developer, and in my experience we always find things that could be done different, spend hours tracking down the source of some fringe bug, or think of new features a product could benefit from, especially if we enjoy working on it.
Things might be considered done, but i never was in a situation where one could not think of more things that could be done.
