How I Was Able to Motivate Myself To Start My First Side Project

I was thinking about starting a side project for a while and as many others who want to start a side project would understand, I spent a lot time reading others encouraging people to develop their own ideas.

After reading for a while, I sat with a friend to get some tips on how to effectively use my time. After all, the man has two children, same as me, but finds time to do so many things that I could only dream of doing.

So I decided to stop the excuses and start doing.

I removed the Facebook application from my phone, saved materials I wish to read and started to feed my mind with knowledge instead of garbage (well, I don’t consider Marvel’s shows as garbage, so they were saved).

After a while, I had so many ideas and things that I wanted to try in my own new project, but I wasn’t closer to starting a side project than I was before. And it felt terrible. 

I couldn’t explain why I still could not find the time and, if to be more precise, the will to start something of my own. Anything. I couldn’t care less about the result, I just wanted to write something, but I didn’t.

Time passed, and I reinstalled the Facebook app on my phone, and returned to the old habit of scrolling an endless feed with no purpose at all. I kinda accepted the fact that a side project is a nice concept, but not for me. And it was fine.

Or so I thought.

It was a regular evening and I was sitting with my spouse and talking about the regular things we did in the day. He was telling me about a problem he has, while sharing a Google Sheet between his teammates to manage the tasks of a certain project. That makes no sense to me. Sharing a sheet between all team members means everyone has access to the whole document (well, you can manage the permissions to each row or cell, but it requires a lot of effort to maintain it through time).

“There must be some tools that handle exactly that” I told him. There are, of course, but apparently his company doesn’t want to allocate budget for that.

That was when I realized that I could do it for him, quite easily honestly.

In that moment, when my head started breaking the problem into requirements and thinking about implementation details, I realized what is it that I was missing so far.

Ideas were not enough for me. I needed a client. I needed a real problem to solve. I didn’t even mind solving a problem that already has a solution, as long as I could do it my way and have someone who is waiting for me to deliver.

I needed clear requirements, a time frame and maybe most importantly, someone to update along the way, who isn’t me (cause, well, it’s quite easy to cut yourself some slack).

It’s quite obvious, I guess, but I would write it nonetheless:

In order to accomplish your goal, you need to find the right motivation for you. It (probably) is different from your friends or colleagues. Find your own way to ignite your passion and chase your dreams.

To make this more interesting and educative, I chose not to use the same tools I’ve been using at my daily job, but to learn a new framework to work with and some other new technologies.

Can’t wait to write another post explaining how I chose to implement my first side project!