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

Well right now I'm watching a movie, and tomorrow I shall be going out and the day after I'll probably do some reading and maybe some studying for school.

Yeah I notice theres no programming in there :p.

Basically, as it's been said before, if you don't want to program don't force yourself to. There will be lots of time to do that when you work.

Anyway if i really need to get some work done, I make a schedule every week and try to adhere to it as best as possible. You can average out work between multiple projects and the fun and boring stuff so as to not lose to much motivation. It's made every week because I never actually make the schedule hence it needs to be updated frequently.

You'll find once you get one project done, you get snowballing momentum, and then when you let go of that it's hard to get anything done.

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.

I totally agree with everyone here. That said...

I really need to find myself a good todo manager... And I need to re train myself to use one, with lots of little steps instead of all the larger ones that look like too much damn work

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.

What I use is notepad. An example todo list of mine looks like this:
(It's from the DCGG.)

It works as follows.
I first insert one line per item todo:

() make chickens palette
() animate chicken walking left
() draw bomb icon

I then sometimes put priority numbers in front of those items (whenever I don't feel like working them down from top to bottom).
When an item is done, I immediately go and check it off the list by putting a 'v' inside the '()'. What's very important with this is to think "The V stands for victory!" when putting it in there.
The items that are already done are kept on the list, so that in times of motivation problems, it is visible that already lots of stuff has been done and that gives me faith that the other things will also be done eventually.

So.. why is DCGG still not finished? Well, I got a job while I was working on it, so it's basically on ice.
Anyway, remember: "The V stands for victory!"

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.

Sometimes you just have days like that..

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...)

Isn't this the project that was supposed to take two weeks, two months ago? I'd say it's about time to wrap this thing up and move on to other things....

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

Hmm.. a few people here seem to be suggesting he should give up. That would be a mistake in my opinion, he should carry on and finish the paint program.

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

Yesterday I discovered this blog with lots of useful advice. This one is the top 20 motivation tips BTW, ML's advice is #2!

Enjoy and happy programming!

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

It depends on what the 50 lines of code has to do. There have been plenty of times where I took a couple days to write 5 lines of code and I didn't consider that "too slow".

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..

Did you go to the john yet? That's what I do when I can't think of what to program. Turns out I need to take a dump and it was that that prevented me from thinking.

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

Crazy Photon: ... both your links are identical.

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Thanks gnolam, corrected!