How I stay motivated

I tend to read a lot of posts on entrepreneurship. Not necessarily because I think of myself as an entrepreneur, but more because I’m fascinated with the topic and learning about what to do (and not to do). Amongst all of the advice I’d read there’s been a lot of common themes. One of them is that you’ll spend a lot of time on your business, far more time than you’d spend in any regular job. The second is that you really need to love what you’re doing if you want to stay motivated.

As much as I love working on my website there are days when I would really rather be doing something else. Such as, for instance, when some new downloadable content comes out for a game and I’d rather be playing that than programming. It happens. So how do I keep motivated?

I’ve started many projects previously and I have a very bad habit of starting a project only to get halfway through it and start on a new, different project. But I’ve been doing something different this time, and it’s working to my advantage: blogging. As simple as it sounds, keeping a blogging schedule has led me to make constant, steady progress on my site. By requiring myself to post something new every few days I have to make progress on the site, otherwise I have nothing to blog about. And there’s always something worth blogging about, whether it’s discussing how I solved a problem, or implemented a new technology, or mockups I created for a page I’m going to build, etc. There’s always something new, but only if I’ve been working on my site. Blogging about what I’m working on is definitely a practice I’ll take with me on other projects I work on (but not before I’m done with this one!).