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shaikh709's avatar

Unable to continue Working

I have a serious problem. When I have a project or an idea to work on. At the beginning I work on it like 16 or 14 hours a day but as few days goes. I usually lose interest and it gets hard for me to continue working on project. I don't know if it is procrastination or what ? Please suggest me something. Thank you.

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15 replies
mushood's avatar

lol. I have the same thing. Its not limited to programming. Its human nature, for me at least.

YOU WANT TO GET GOOD, COMMIT YOURSELF!

Thats the best advice i ever had. Especially, if it is yelled at you. :)

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jaydeluca's avatar

I have struggled with this as well, and what I found to help is trying to make it into a sort of game.

Do you use Github? Have you looked at your contribution history visual representation where every day is a box on a grid and the more commits you do, the greener it gets?

Try and get into the habit of at least 1 (quality) commit per day. Most of the time for me, I'll come up with a small task to complete, and then a couple hours later I realize that it had snowballed and I got way more done than I anticipated.

The visual representation makes it fun for me, and I've found it to be quite effective.

Everyone is different though. Hope this helps.

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mushood's avatar

@jaydeluca ! SECONDED! You wanna make it all green. haha. and yes, it does snowball a lot of times!

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phpMick's avatar

Don't work on it 16 hours a day.

Work on it 8 hours a day (productively) then go and enjoy yourself, have a swim, climb a hill, fly a kite, get outside.

Mick

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martinbean's avatar

@shaikh709 Well of course you’re going to lose interest. No one can work 14–16 hours a day and keep that pace up for more than a couple of days or so. Therefore, limit your working time. Allow yourself time to re-charge and you’ll find your interest in the project will be prolonged.

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shaikh709's avatar

First Thank you guys.

That's what I thought. I Should not work 14-16 Hours. But I can't sleep at night because everything is running in my head. If I try to pass time by watching movies or stuff then I feel like wasting time instead why not program and I don't program all 14-16 Hours. Its like working on how to use or implement logic, etc. Why Am I asking here?. Because I am pretty sure you all have been through this situation and may be you all have your own way for solving this problem.

and I am worried about it because I don't have any other jobs. This is the only way I earn my living.

Thanks.

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Amol87's avatar

@shaikh709 That's why you why you should relax and put your mind on something else. Try sports, great for clearing your mind. Without clearing your mind, it is impossible to work long hours for a longer time.

Do something active instead of watching TV. It will give you a better feeling about yourself.

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option's avatar

This too happens to me. I have so many projects with ideas to get into but always get so far (usually 30 hours in) and I get distracted and lose focus followed by interest.

I found, headphones with some good music, lots of redbull and regular breaks help hugely. I too make it a game now with projects, I use a self hosted gitlab so I don't have the green bit but my aim is for 4 or more commits per session and never stop on an odd commit number. I hate stopping on odd numbers so if I'm on 11 ill push to 12.

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Reached's avatar

I also have the side-project bug, what worked for me recently to actually get a project launched, was to break it completely down and focus on the minimum amount of functionality, and then simply push it out.

I built https://tweetsnippet.com in a couple of days following this philosophy :)

Robstar's avatar

Definitely don;t work 16 hrs a day. That's simply not sustainable. I find writing a big list of tasks at the start of the project helps.

Then as I complete tasks or stages I mark them off the list. This is oddly motivating and keeps me on track.

SamL's avatar
SamL
Best Answer
Level 1

@shaikh709 I can relate to this issue. I tend to want to hammer out tonnes of code at the beginning because I'm worried I'm going to forget things/lose inspiration.

A trick to help with that (for me, at least) is to put all my ideas in the issues tab in GitHub before I write a line of code.

Then when I begin working on it, I do short, regular hours with breaks.

If I don't have breaks and limit myself, I ended up getting annoyed by a tiny bug or feature I want to implement and closing down the IDE; never to look at it again.

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shaikh709's avatar

@SamL Exactly. Same thing happens with me. I will definitely give it a try.

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