If you're losing motivation when working on side projects, don't feel productive or simply don't know where to start, this is the approach I usually take with the side projects I actually "finish". Maybe it'll help you as well.

Idea, Requirements and Motivation

I usually start with an idea of what I want to achieve (A website for announcing group events! A bullet hell game!) and then start refining it into some sort of a general requirements list or a list of features I'd like to have. Then I try to minimize the requirements as much as I can to a minimum viable product (MVP) that I think I'd be satisfied with.

I also start thinking about what's in it for me. Is it to learn a new tech? Is it to have fun? Is it something that I'll find useful?

I've found that the projects that motivate me the most are those that I find useful.

Many projects end after this stage when I see how much work needs to be done or when I find that it doesn't interests me enough, and that's fine. I got to practice my skills of generating ideas, defining requirements and minimizing scope. And those are good things to practice. So I just file the project description in my private repository of projects that I might (read: won't) do one day.

Design and Exploration

If the project survives the first stage, I create a general design describing the general architecture and which skills/libraries do I need to be familiar with to accomplish this project, and then do a quick tour to reduce the amount of unknowns.

Sometimes in this process I think about different or easier ideas to implement, or ones that are more interesting to me, and start working on those instead.

Sometimes I just decide that I don't want to work on all these things right now and stop there.

Incremental Implementation

But when a project survives the general design phase, I then go and list the first few things I should do in order to build the project and start breaking them down to small tasks that I can manage in relatively short time and that will show some progress.

This is really important to me.

In order to get back to a project I need to know what the next thing I should do is, I need to know that it's not something that's going to take too long, and I need to see some progress in order to get some gratification from what I done.

The end of each session should be "what's the next I should work on?". Once you get the ball rolling when you begin a session, and get some gratification at the end of a session, it's easier to keep going with a project. And this is the fuel that keeps me working on projects.

If I don't know what is the next thing I should be doing and how much time and effort it's going to take or I won't see some visual improvement after what I did, I probably won't feel like actually doing anything.

Note that I find refactors fine. The progress made is in the code quality and the ability to achieve the next goals with ease. They also give a nice change of pace once in a while. But they should be done when they simplify the upcoming tasks, and not done arbitrarily.

Summary

So, in short:

  1. Create some sort of spec and reduce it only to what you really need.
  2. Think about what you will get from working on this project.
  3. Make a general design, understand your tools and reduce surprises.
  4. Split some of the work to small tasks you can finish quickly that will actually show progress.
  5. Build your project incrementally and keep going back to (4) as needed.
  6. ???
  7. Project!