I enjoy programming, and making things, but my side projects are the only code I write which really lets me be creative. So I keep going because I want to like what I do.
Also,sometimes the only thing keeping me going is the sunk cost fallacy. I don't want to just give up on something I spent months or years on.
But one think that did help me out was learning to recognize the difference between moving forward and moving in circles. Not wasting a lot of time refactoring stuff - especially if a lot of time has passed - because your tastes or mood has changed. I have one project (a web project, nothing anyone would care about) that I literally rebuilt from the ground up at least three times already, just because I got sick of the current framework I was using. I wasted a lot of time moving in circles because I didn't actually want to finish the project, but I did want to keep working on it.
Also,sometimes the only thing keeping me going is the sunk cost fallacy. I don't want to just give up on something I spent months or years on.
But one think that did help me out was learning to recognize the difference between moving forward and moving in circles. Not wasting a lot of time refactoring stuff - especially if a lot of time has passed - because your tastes or mood has changed. I have one project (a web project, nothing anyone would care about) that I literally rebuilt from the ground up at least three times already, just because I got sick of the current framework I was using. I wasted a lot of time moving in circles because I didn't actually want to finish the project, but I did want to keep working on it.