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Syakir Rahman
Syakir Rahman

Posted on

How do you stay motivated to work on side project ?

I have a full time job as a full-stack developer. Since covid-19 pandemic, i'm working from home. So i got more spare time and i decided to rebuild my own blog devaradise.com.

I wrote some tutorials there and published them weekly. But sometime, i'm feeling unmotivated to write even when i have some topics in mind.

So, i just want to know if there is anyone who feel like me. How do you stay motivated for your side project? It doesn't have to be a blog. It can be an open source project, a startup project, or anything.

Top comments (2)

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Ben Halpern

My aha moment was to give myself a long window for success. Regardless of what "success" looks to you, if you can create a dynamic where you commit to working on this in a sustainable way for a long time (years) before deeming it a success or a failure, you might just get good results and just know you can get temporarily bored or distracted, but that loss of momentum won't kill the project, because you've committed.

When starting my current "project", I gave myself 10 years to see if it could be successful, and this relieved some pressure and kept me motivated. I started @thepracticaldev and gradually built it up, launched dev.to about two years later, started the company around it, discovered the forem path, etc. Still going. It's been six years and it has been very successful. I was prepared to put 10 years in even if the impact was minimal for the first 9. If at year 10 it was still not going anywhere, I gently retire it.

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Syakir Rahman

Wow! Thanks for the reply, Ben!
That's very inspiring.
6 years of consistency is not a short time and you still working on it. No wonder if Dev.to will the biggest developer community.