Finishing Projects

[Deku Tree]

I was hoping for some advice from some of you. I've been having a hard time finishing projects lately, or sometimes even starting them. Working a project from start to end always seems to get derailed and they either end up in the "to do" pile or I never start them in the first place. How do you all find a way to make incremental progress on your projects? Any tips for a newbie?

[ataradov]

Rotate though them when you feel burned out. Over time things should get completed. Things that I need immediately get the priority, plus there is a real incentive to finish them.

Some things get to prototype stage and don't work out or don't make sense. No need to complete things that are not going to work out anyway. That's fine.

[pigtwo]

This is a pretty common problem.  When you think about a future project you're only thinking about the interesting parts of it and you don't really think about the tedious stuff.  But the project that you're working on requires you to think about and do all that tedious stuff.  So naturally the next project is always way more interesting than the current project. 

For me what helps is to create a detailed, concrete list of objectives and goals for a project.  Then you only work on that project until you're done.  Don't do any preliminary research or anything into future projects until you're done with the current one.  Make sure you really do everything on that list of goals or you'll lose motivation and have a bunch of nearly finished projects. 

In regards to starting projects I'm sure most people have projects that they want to work on but for some reason they don't have the motivation to do so.  When I'm feeling like this I usually try to sort of trick myself into working on it.  One method is to get you're self to do some extremely small task that is required.  After that the inertia of idleness is mostly gone and it's not so hard to keep working.  For example, if I'm working on a circuit board I might tell myself that all I have to to do is open the software and get everything set up to start working on the project.  Then I can choose to keep working or just do something else.  Most of the time I decide to keep working. 

Another thing that help me is to find the time when your motivation is the highest and work at that time.  For me that time is the morning.  So I actually wake up stupid early so I can get a couple of hours of work done on personal projects before the work day turns me into a empty husk of a human being. 

In my opinion this is 50% self control/will power and 50% strategies that assist your will power.  You still need to be able to start working on something even when you kind of don't feel like it. 

That's just a couple of things that work for me.  Others might feel differently and that might work better for you. 

[Gyro]

There was a similar thread a while back. Some of the answers there might be helpful to you....

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/why-unfinished-projects/msg1557931/#msg1557931

[Deku Tree]

Thank you guys for the feedback, it's encouraging to hear I'm not the only one that struggles with this. The linked thread ^ was a great resource, I'm reading the whole thing now.

[wilfred]

There is nothing anyone here suffers with, who suffers alone.

My advice is to write down a list of steps needed to finish a project. Then flesh it out with a specific plan.

I find myself tossing over  various ideas that I am more or less certain about for quite a long time. That's where the problem lies.

You need to break that unending cycle of inaction and it is the writing down that helps with that.

[dnwheeler]

I completely agree with the comments about making a list. Just putting the list together gets me thinking about the project and motivates me to work on it. Then, there is the satisfaction that comes with each item you cross off the list.

Also, whenever you have some spare time, you can look at the list for something to do that fits your available time. This way, you can make progress just through small increments that may otherwise be wasted time.