I tried three times to get myself to program more of my graphics application today but all three times I was only able to get about 50 lines of code in before my mind turned to jelly. Food didn't help, water didn't help, and neither did pop.

Granted, I'm adding the file handler into my program now, which is something I'm not greatly experienced at doing, and it's being made more overwhelming since eight of the ten load/save dialogue windows are all using the same code. (So that I only have to write them once instead of eight times.)

...I find it funny that I can write a basic tile mapping system within an hour but I can only get 1/3rd of a file handler done in three.

I didn't get any work done on it for over a week as I was working on documentation for other projects coming up, so I'm only up to v0.11a. (About 3000 lines of code.)

But enough about that. I'm basically wondering what everyone here uses to motivate themselves. Perhaps I can apply some of the wisdom to my own situation and really get myself wanting to program again.

--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- http://www.pixelships.com

First, ask yourself if it's really that important. You only live once, so there's not much use in doing something you don't want to do.

That said, it's very hard to do something when you feel like you are on an island by yourself and that your work is irrelevant. So one tip is to share the details of your project with people and create excitement about it. Also, you need to discover a purpose. If you cannot justify what you are doing, then you won't be motivated to do it.

Basic daily motivators are as simple as keeping track of a TODO list and forcing yourself to do at least one per day, no matter how small it is. Taking extended time off a project can effectively kill it.

ML's really got a point here. I decided to take a break from my rigorous programming as of late to get back in the mood, but haven't managed to get back into the swing of things. Little breaks are okay, long breaks are bad. You know, you have a four day vacation from work and on your first day back you don't want to work too hard. With hobbyist programming, you don't have to work at all, and the "vacation" will keep being extended.

As I said before, I hate dealing with files and/or file handling. In situations like this, there's two options. Sit down and chain yourself to your desk until you get it done or have several modules of your project you can work on and when the file stuff gets annoying, work on another, less-annoying module.

Kris, sounds like you need to take a few days break? Get away from where you are and just blob out somewhere without the PC.

Sadly thats not easy enough nor pretty enough. Something that effectively timed how much I work on an item would be nice to... But that would be interesting and inaccurate (you'd have to like attach projects to program windows and check for usage...)

Except hes making it so he can use it. Its a tool after all.

If you're working with Eclipse, check out Mylar.

Thanks for the advice, everyone!

In regards to taking extended breaks, I find I can't. Every day I always seem to work on some project or another, whether as code, as graphics, as sound, as music, or as documentation. It's actually very hard for me to skip away from my work for too long.

The thing is it's hard for me to work on one thing at a time. So when I try to work on the most important thing, it doesn't necessarily end up being the thing I want to work on. (And my drawing program is important as its font features will dramatically cut down the amount of time it takes for me to make conceptual screenshots.)

The past six or seven weeks has only seen about four weeks of effort into my drawing program, one of which was conceptualization, so only three weeks of programming has actually gone into that project since I started it.

Beyond that I've been working on documentation for four game ideas, three of which I'm likely to make by the end of next year, and my game engine docs.

I guess, to be more specific, I believe what I meant was I need to find a way to motivate myself to do what I need to do, rather than what I want to do.

It wasn't hard when I coded for another company, though occasionally I would spend a day or more writing side-code that wasn't actually going to go into what we were making, but which probably saved me time in the long run. And every opportunity that came up where I could code something above and beyond the standard, I jumped at it. But, while I worked for that company, I found it was nearly impossible to code at home. (Coding for 6-8 hours a day would leave me not wanting to look at another line of code afterwards.)

And it doesn't help that we weren't using C/C++, so for two years my C/C++ skills atrophied. It's been taking me time to really get back into it.

--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- http://www.pixelships.com

I find bugzilla highly demotivating. My todo list never moves. And finishing a bug isn't rewarding at all, it just drops me off at the next bug in the list!

Something simple, a cool graphic, maybe even a flash gadget saying "Good job!" would do wonders for my motivation..

It's very difficult to stay motivated. Almost all of my personal projects ended up in the recycle bin.

Thanks gnolam, corrected!