[PaulHoule]

I went through a phase of making demos and trying to pitch for the development of a product. I got burned out from that and got an ordinary job.

I got back into side projects involving programming, photography and art that I was doing totally on my own.

This year, collaborators found me. I was posting to Mastodon with and about my smart RSS reader and that got the interest of a person who is trying to develop his own pitch for a business idea. That's changed the direction of my "second brain". I also met a seamstress (IRL) who I'll be collaborating with to take advantage of on-demand fabric printing.

One answer to the problem of waiting for people is to have a few projects going. At most times I have 3 side projects that I've "committed" to but I am really making progress on 2 which I feel is OK. I think the most important management practice is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_(development)

which basically means you have to limit how many projects you are working on at a time. If you have 15 projects going you are probably going to get diverted in too many directions and not finish any one of them. If you have just 1 you have to stop working as soon as you need to get a reply. If you're just slightly under- or over-subscribed you can just work on project #2 when #1 is blocked on someone else. (e.g. slight under-subscription lets you provide a high SLA to customers/collaborators, if you're slightly over-subscribed on your own projects you're the only person who will get mad.)