So, I have 2 months before I go to finish my last year in CS. Every time I sit down to start a project, I will work on it for a few days, and immediately stop working on it.
How do you stay focused for these long projects? Or what are some techniques that you follow to keep at it for longer stretches?
I’m not much of a programmer. I’m working on an android app for personal use though and for me I treat it like a physics problem.
Break it down into smaller less daunting tasks learn how to do a small piece, practice that a bit, then play with it until I can incorporate it into my app. If I get bored with one part of it I switch gears and work on a different piece.
Breaking it into smaller pieces let’s me have a lot of small accomplishments when I learn something new and incorporate it. The small accomplishments give me a good dopamine rush and keep me motivated.
This strategy makes a lot of sense. When you get to a section of the program though that you know you are going to dread, whether it be something with the UI or something in the backend, do you knock off sections of it while working on other parts? Or do you try to get it out of the way as quick as possible? These parts for me tend to be the ones that kill a project.
I’m lucky that for me it’s just a hobby so if I get burnt out I can take a break. I don’t have deadlines to meet or anything like that. So what I do is usually just quit working on it until I get interested again or the state its in bugs me enough to fix it.
Again I’m not exactly a programmer though and if you do it for a living I suspect it’s like anything else where you just suck it up and try to get through it until you get to go home.
This is definitely the way to do it in my opinion. I always feel way better about my projects the more granular I can make them.