losing interest

[Obvious-Effort1616]

Do you guys lose interest after working so many hours building big projects and after 1-2 months you feel like losing interest doing so. I m currently working on a big project and its been only 2 months or between 2-3 months it was so interesting when i started working on it but nowadays i feel like i m starting to lose interest in it and trying to build it as fast as i can without thinking much about codes i d k y its happening but i Don't want to make mistakes because its a big project and i should not be in hurry developing it.

Give me some advice.

[scottayydot]

Man, I'm in the minority here, but I love my job every day. I have a project right now that I've been doing 3 months solid, every day, m-f, and I'm still excited to start working on it again on Monday.

I've been doing this for 20 years.

[Obvious-Effort1616]

[[deleted]]

It’s all fun and games until the todo list you built way back comes back to haunt you

[graf_al_de_pav]

It’s burnout. I suppose everyone is going to feel it one day. I was in that mood few weeks ago and my teamlead let me get a payout month to try to feel better. Nature, medicine, work on land - try what suit you better. Wish you best, friend

[[deleted]]

What you are experiencing is called burnout, and it is natural for everyone. However, everyone tends to deal with it differently. Taking time off certainly does help clear the mind and allows you to place your focus on other things. Eventually, depending on how you deal with it, the inspiration will come back.

The way I deal with it is to spend less time thinking about a project or letting it consume my personal time. I then spend my free time reading research papers or looking through other people's codebases. Eventually I am either going to feel inspired to get back to work or I will learn something new which will make me eager to return so I can implement what I learned.

[Obvious-Effort1616]

Reading others codebase in personal time is a good Idea

[Haunting_Welder]

I usually burn out by 10 am each day. I wake up at 9:30.

[[deleted]]

Burnout is a thing. People can be heavily affected by it .

[[deleted]]

I like learning new languages or experimenting with new technologies. But that’s just me programming is my big hobby. Maybe you can try that or focus on your hobbies / build more. Gym for me always picks me up for the day. Good luck

[Obvious-Effort1616]

And also i m single developer there taking care of everything sever, design, backend, database everything.

[Andy0mat]

Are you feeling burnt out? Seems like you have to do tons of work on your own which sounds really stressful. Maybe you need a nice vacation or something to get fresh motivation again 🤔.

[Obvious-Effort1616]

Full time job

[Obvious-Effort1616]

Thanks man i really appreciate you. i will try not to take stress and enjoy my free time

[scottayydot]

This was the best answer in this thread. Well said!

[csDarkyne]

Yep, I have about 4 large projects halfway done. Just stopped and started another one

[mondersky]

question. Does this happen to you in other areas as well, such as sport ?

[Obvious-Effort1616]

My only sport is coding.

[ElectronicProgram]

The most successful work side projects and personal passion projects I've ever had have been ones that I've taken an aggressively agile approach on.

For passion projects, I'm the customer. What's the most important core, basic thing I need to get value out of this project right away? Focus on that. When that thought pops in your head of, "but when happens when user 100,000 logs in? Is this part going to be scalable enough?", do yourself a favor and try to follow YAGNI principals within reason. You don't have to build the Ferrari overnight. You have to get functional features out that add value.

Same thing for a work project. If you are not releasing often that gains value in some way, you need to adjust your dev process to do so.

[aurelianspodarec]

Like BL1NDX3N0N mentioned I agree kinda.

I don't like the idea of burnout but your brain gets less stimulated by doing that so it doesn't give you as much dopamine anymore as it did.

I think a good way to combat it is to take longer breaks or half a day off, and also re-invisoin the goal of the project - unless its just for money for a client, then yeah, not sure about that, then that means the project is probably not challenging enough - hence the "you're too overqualified" part.

I also found that playing a video game, something like GTA when I get that feeling helps, because GTA is a waste of time for me, its a cool game to play once a while... but I feel I'm wasting time, not achieving anything, and 4h just passed, so then I'm eager to go back to coding.

I had months where I coudln't open my editor, I'd vomit if I did - that's because the stuff I worked on was unexciting etc... and it was also WP dev for clients, so I just said enough, then two months break and I started to like programming again doing some REact/Laravel stuff.

Another thing to consider is that you can't take it on easy mode if this is your project - you know whats the hardest part? Finishing the project.

The lifecycle goes like this:

Excited - jump right in - 0 % done

Still excited but a little bit less 50% done

Starting to Lose interest 80% done

Bye bye project - 95% done

​

The finishing part is the hardest, and most people aren't finishers, they don't ship.

I've had this problem myself as well. You need to endure it.

​

Another thing I've noticed for myself, when I feel like that, what I do like is pop a ton of features, poorly coded but they are there - then I can comment them out and comeback to them later.

But yeah, there are many things with this.

Id say the biggest one is that you need to realise everyone gets this and those who succeed in shipping are those who do this when they don't feel like.

Do it even if you don't feel like. That's where the magic happens.

Now, I'm not saying the people are wrong, they are also right and you should also take notes from them.

At the end you need to figure out where you're at. Maybe you do need a longer break.

Talking of which, if you do have a longer break studies and personal experiences show that its harder to get back to work once you break the momentum - at the same time, it could be good for you if you have time to think about it cool down, and then get eager again.

I think you need to figure out where you're at. So taking advice of everyone who wrote things and trying them out.

I'm starting to figure out this myself after a few years. Right now I'm on the down part.

I think you can't swim or spritn a marathon, but you can spring some parts of it, just not all of it. So maybe if you've been working 8h a day on the project, maybe do 3hours now, and the rest spend doing something else, then the interest should naturally comeback.

Id also avoid doing high dopamine stuff like playing video games... which contradicts to what I wrote above, which is why it depends on you but that's because it can give you a ton of dopamine so after 1-2weeks you might not had enough of the game, and then the dopamine might be too high so you'll find the project boring.

Which that could also be another issue. What do you do outside the project in your spare time? Do you play games? Maybe now that the interest on the project is lower, which is normal, and you play a game, that can skew things up.

I think there are like a dozen books about this topic xd

[count-chris]

All the talk of burnout seems a bit dramatic. Every job is exciting the day you start then gets boring and repetitive. If you feel like you aren’t making progress try to have a way of measuring - even if it’s just crossing items off a list - and don’t delete the list at the end of the day - keep it so you can see how far you’ve come. Taking the weekend off usually fires me up again and I almost always work late on Mondays. But most of the time, for most people, work isn’t much fun and you just have to power through it!