How many times have you gotten straight to work on a coding side project that you’d just gotten the lightning bolt of inspiration for, only to fantastically fizzle out a few days later once you ran into a tough problem that you weren’t motivated to solve?

I’ll go ahead and raise my hand right up.

And it sucks! Seriously, the gap between that burning motivation to build your project and then the sputtering loss of inspiration can be so frustrating.

And the thing that’s even more frustrating than that is the fact that it seems to have become a pattern that happens every time you come up with and start in on building out a new idea.

And then you end up with a sad wasteland of folders within a ‘projects’ folder on your desktop that you can’t bring yourself to delete because that you mean that you’re really not going to get around to those particular projects one day. Le sigh.

I personally got tired of this sad project-starting-and-never-shipping pattern, and I decided to come up with a personal plan for overcoming it.

Here’s that side-project plan for you, my creative coding friend. May you always follow through on the side projects you undertake:

1. Check in with how realistic your expectations are
2. Set one achievable goal project to remain focused on
3. Give yourself a useful constraint
4. Commit to showing up for yourself x amount of time each week
5. At the end of your time frame, celebrate your progress (even if you aren’t done, look at just how far you’ve come since beginning)

For a deep dive into the steps outlined above, I invite you to listen to today's episode of my podcast The Ladies Code Collective Podcast here >>

Enjoy!