Okay, let’s talk.

I had a super productive period on this blog a few weeks ago. I thought nothing could stop me from updating this blog. I had lots of ideas, lots of motivation, and a lot of energy to write these posts. Even so, I’m blocked. I feel like life has gotten in the way of doing what I like to do with this blog. I’ve been sick, I’ve had work travel, I’ve had a minor surgery. I can come up with a lot of reasons for why I’ve dropped off with updating this blog but I can’t answer why I haven’t just started up again. What I’ve learned over time is that my drive to do side projects follows a rollercoaster pattern. For the rest of this post, I’m going to overview some ideas that I have to cope with this. This is mostly reminders for me, but hopefully, you can get some use out of this as well.

Queue Updates

I have come to realize that I am not consistent with content generation. I’m just not. I will go through phases of hyper-productivity and phases of incredible procrastination. The way I can cope with that is to schedule completed posts in the future. If I have a buffer of updates, it gives me time to roll through the unproductive times without feeling incredibly awful about posting a new update. By the way, all of this pressure is completely self-imposed. I’m not sure anyone cares how often I update this thing. I just feel like I should.

Finish Things

Speaking of “completed posts”, I have several open drafts that are just sitting there, unfinished. As drafts stagnate, I have realized that it’s incredibly hard to get myself back into the mindset to pick up a draft and finish it. To deal with this issue, I will try to complete an idea before moving on to a new one. That means that I should either scrap the idea or complete the post. I sometimes hit roadblocks that are entirely dependent on me doing something that I don’t want to do. That is a death sentence for a post… and I need to be more honest with myself in identifying these cases and just dropping the idea. This is a side project. The whole point is that I like doing it… and if it’s pushing me in directions I don’t want to go then I should just drop that idea. This isn’t my job.

To the future

I hope to get better at my side-project productivity in the future. Hopefully, some of that was useful to read. It’s certainly useful for me to type out. Happy coding and may your side projects thrive, no matter how variable the productivity may be!