[judofyr]

I’ve had that feeling, and I started making an effort to improve myself. I started time-tracking my side projects (“you can’t improve what you don’t measure”), scheduling time for learning, and set up an automatic summary sent on email every week.

It didn’t work for me at all, and ended up basically killing every joy in my side projects. If I missed a scheduled hour (because I was doing something else fun) I felt like a failure. I could only focus on “I should be working on x” instead of actually thinking about x.

These days I try to not worry too much about what I should learn/produce, and rather work on what interests me at the time. I’m probably not learning at the most effective rate, but at least I’m having fun.

[teacpde]

I share similar experience, I find I can only achieve learning at a high effective rate with strong short-term motivation, and it can become tiring very quickly. On the other hand, I can always enjoy having fun and learn without worrying about effectiveness.