I'm convinced that the key is to be able to work without motivation. It doesn't mean that you don't need motivation in general, it means that there will be days when you simply don't feel motivated.
Consistency is the key.
You have to show up.
Every. Single. Day.
You have to create the right environment for it. Some would call it a transformative environment.
You have to organize your days, your environment in a way so that you don't need the motivation to work on your side project. You simply fall into the right place to do so.
How to achieve this?
One way is creating a daily routine. I know exactly that Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 8:30 I write for 25 minutes for my blog. No matter what. If I don't feel like it? Who cares? I just start writing and then keep writing. I have been posting for more than two years every single week. I apply this technique to many things.
Another way to do so is to have an accountability partner. Every night I decide on 3 important things I'll do the next day and send it to my accountability partner. Then the next evening before sending the new 3 things, I also report on how I performed. It is motivating, not to fail to do what I committed to. I also share weekly and monthly goals.
In the beginning, I tended to share goals that were not stretching, things that I would have done anyway. Like on Tuesday evening, I wrote that well, I'm gonna work on my next post. Of course, because Wednesday is coming and on Wednesday morning, I write! So, I started to write more specific goals, like finishing this and that part of the post or to make the necessary registrations for my side project. To figure out an integration between my mailing list provider and AWS, etc.
These things helped me so much to become a finisher. End of July, I decided to go live with Daily C++ Interview by the end of next month and I did. Well, I published the article about it on 2nd September, but that's only because that's my habit. To post on every Wednesday.
After all, we are people of habit.
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Great post, it's such an important topic!
I'm convinced that the key is to be able to work without motivation. It doesn't mean that you don't need motivation in general, it means that there will be days when you simply don't feel motivated.
Consistency is the key.
You have to show up.
Every. Single. Day.
You have to create the right environment for it. Some would call it a transformative environment.
You have to organize your days, your environment in a way so that you don't need the motivation to work on your side project. You simply fall into the right place to do so.
How to achieve this?
One way is creating a daily routine. I know exactly that Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 8:30 I write for 25 minutes for my blog. No matter what. If I don't feel like it? Who cares? I just start writing and then keep writing. I have been posting for more than two years every single week. I apply this technique to many things.
Another way to do so is to have an accountability partner. Every night I decide on 3 important things I'll do the next day and send it to my accountability partner. Then the next evening before sending the new 3 things, I also report on how I performed. It is motivating, not to fail to do what I committed to. I also share weekly and monthly goals.
In the beginning, I tended to share goals that were not stretching, things that I would have done anyway. Like on Tuesday evening, I wrote that well, I'm gonna work on my next post. Of course, because Wednesday is coming and on Wednesday morning, I write! So, I started to write more specific goals, like finishing this and that part of the post or to make the necessary registrations for my side project. To figure out an integration between my mailing list provider and AWS, etc.
These things helped me so much to become a finisher. End of July, I decided to go live with Daily C++ Interview by the end of next month and I did. Well, I published the article about it on 2nd September, but that's only because that's my habit. To post on every Wednesday.
After all, we are people of habit.