How do I trick my brain into completing a project? I’m making an app that shows which voice actor plays a character in the movie and what other movies they act in. It’s useful for me personally but I feel like I’m making something that’s been done numerous times over and I lost the momentum because I’m on vacation with my family now. I ran into some problems with the project too and getting help takes a ton of time so it’s disrupting the rythm too. I really have to put at least 2-3 projects like this for a portfolio;_;
i read this somewhere, and i can’t recall where now, but it anecdotally feels very true:
as soon as you tell someone about something you’re working on but haven’t finished yet, you get a premature dopamine hit. for some reason, that messes with the reward centre in your brain and makes it less likely to actually finish the fucking thing, like you’ve already sucked the juice out leaving an empty husk. so, my secret to finishing programming side projects has been to tell no one of them until they’re ready. this is heavily paraphrased, i know nothing.
Yeahh I heard about it. But I have to tell people about it when I’m asking for help. I’m trying to do as much on my own as possible but there are moments where it’s more than I can deal with.
Don’t tell them the whole project. Breaking a problem down to smaller components will help you conceptualize possible solutions, narrow down the problem space, and avoid the dopamine hit effect by discussing a single discrete problem, e.g. “how do I pull [x] from the database.”
I only described it here for context, usually I focus on the functionality itself, unless the bigger picture is needed even though it’s a little difficult for me to tell which details are important and what can be omitted. Sometimes despite my best efforts there’s some confusion and making it right is consuming a lot of energy.
On the flip side I’ve always heard telling other people makes you feel accountable…
But that’s never worked for me, so not telling people might make more sense.