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What you're experiencing is entirely human, and I would venture all developers experience this at given points, unless they are just working through a queue of bugs in a backlog tracker or some such. Now, being a software engineer, I'm not really interested in working harder or just telling myself to get over it. I'd rather use software and a process to hack my own behavior to keep pushing forward. Here is how I've had a little success with this. For a given product, I have a Trello board that tracks the entire machine I am trying to create. (A business is a machine that accepts money and/or time as inputs and outputs a sufficiently interesting amount of more money: the profit.) I'll have lists like Lead Generation, Conversions, Upsells, and Churns. Every project I want to work on within the product needs to fit into one of those lists; it's an easy way to remind myself to not build or work on things that don't matter. Within the lists I have cards for initiatives. These are the projects I would assign to an executive if I had a team of VPs. For example, "Launch ZenDesk with help articles." Within the cards I have checklists of specific milestones or tasks. "Sign up for ZenDesk." "Add CNAME." When I don't have much energy after a full day's work, I can look at my cards and find something I do have the energy to take care of. When I'm wide awake and excited after a good night's sleep, I can add more tasks or initiatives to the Trello board, but the lists help ensure the initiatives are actually pushing the business forward. Finally, I'd look for projects within your product that make sense to open source. One, that makes the projects easier to use on future projects; two, you can show them off when trying to get work in the future; and three, it gives you a really nice sense of satisfaction and a milestone you can point to along the way of building your product. |