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;_;
“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.
Back when I was trying to learn programming I had two key things that worked for me:
- setting
- reward
In my experience if you keep both of these things ironclad then you can get more consistent results. For me it was going to Starbucks and getting a tall white mocha. It was the same Starbucks, and the same seating spot every time I went. And I made sure to turn off all notifications during my coding time. Hell I even put myself on a timer.
It didn’t matter what I did during that time period, but it had to be programming related. Project work? Great! Noodling around with my IDE config to find the perfect color scheme? Still counts. Learning ever detail about a super 1337 shell oneliner? Oh yea
You can’t expect your brain to not jump around, but you can build a system that works with that.
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.
