[skeeter2020]

I have - and still - struggle with this. My (unsolicited) advice:

1. just start anything NOW. Don't worry about getting organized or the correct order; just go. The act of working creates momentum; early on moving is more important than progress.

2. today's good enough > tomorrow's perfect. I found an OSS project for something I was going to build to help me capture "personal content". It's rough and not exactly what I was after but good enough. I've built (less than) half a system to help me with my job on top of PocketBase. Maybe someday I'll finish it (or even add another feature - #1 above has lots of ideas captured!) but until then I get value today.

3. Find something that has ongoing personal value: I help an animal rescue and pay the ongoing costs to run the system I built more than 10 years ago. Dropping $20/month to $5/month is possible but not a big enough motivation for a significant new version. The looming tech debt and support load might be over the rest of this year though!

4. Recognize that the incomplete part of side projects is a feature not a bug. Curiosity and exploration almost always end in specific dead ends, but the illumination gained can be used throughout your life. It's largely the act not the explicit output.

[90s_dev]

> just start anything NOW. Don't worry about getting organized or the correct order; just go

Yes! Projects develop organically, with many stop gap solutions and temporary scaffolds built and torn down along the way. Rome wasn't built in a day.

[butlike]

It sounds like the parent comment is saying they may benefit from NOT doing this. They say they have a million unfinished projects, but if you just GO without a plan, sometimes the momentum fatally wanes when you hit a point where you realized you've painted yourself into a corner.

I'm not saying a completely fleshed-out design document will help, but maybe a rough roadmap with milestone release dates would help keep the projects on track.