[hobofan]

What has helped me (and this may sound like an absurd suggestion as it creates even more work) is to split up all my projects into a public- and a private-facing part, and trying to follow the UNIX principle ("Write programs that do one thing and do it well.").

For all the things I want to share to the world, I'll make it into a small project that from the start has stated goals and non-goals. If there is some divergence from what I need personally from it, I'll have private fork (sometimes also just so I can work on it in a "fast and ugly" manner). By splitting them up consciously, the public and the private part can fulfill their individual goals a lot better ("polished"+finishable public shared part; tailored to my needs perpetual imperfect private part).

That also works surprisingly well for non-code things, like blog posts, where my private versions have a lot more references and detail tidbits sprinkled in, that would overwhelm the target audience of the public version of the post (mostly because it would take too much time to work it into the post in a good way). I guess that's also not a too uncommon phenomenon in the arts, with director's cuts of movies and additional mixes of music existing parallel to the commercially published version.