I started writing this post at the start of April 2025. It’s now the end of June. I appreciate the irony given the title but it was never intended.

Like a lot of full time software developers I host a personal blog. Like most full time software developers with a blog I will sometimes go months if not years without updating it. The current dry streak here is nearly six months. This post is an attempt at breaking that.

I wanted to write about what causes a personal project to stall and why that’s not always a bad thing. I’ll explore my own views and findings in a few hundred words.

Defining a map of projects

I find it difficult to define my goals. What I want to be doing changes with the weather. I have many interests and ideas. The vastness of this becomes overwhelming when it comes to actually finishing a thing. Even defining the categories of things is hard (I try map these on my website and in my personal systems to varying degrees of success). Some examples of “things” I am currently mulling over include songs for my Connections album, levels in Doom, features for an app, and articles for this website.

No perfect schema exists for any group of things. I’m a software developer by day - I know this well! I scribble down ideas in notes and hope that these seeds of imagination will turn into something tangible. Often this is not the case. I will often spend significant time on a thing only for it to be discarded.

I never look for a finish product but I want to spend my time on these creative projects. I may get 20% of the way through and get bored. That’s legitimate and that’s positive. Next time I may reach 30% on a different thing. The point is I enjoy the time I spend. If I keep doing it I might even become vaguely competent.

Not breaking things down

A big culprit it causes my momentum to stall is the size of the task being to big and often tied to other things that should be non-blocking. An example of a current issue is: I want to write a post about Sonic Mania, which I finally managed to get to and ending for earlier in the year. The problem was I didn’t have a category for game reviews coded into the website. This prevented me writing the post while the idea was still fresh in my head. This caused guilt and shame and the idea still sits in my notes.

Another is the system I partially migrated for managing my website posts. Previously, I’ve written everything in a large Google doc. I have my ideas and fixes (and other things) listed in bullets at the top, and then I start writing underneath in a pageless document. This was fine and there wasn’t anything wrong with it. I still wanted to improve it. I had made an effort to move away from Notion for my bullet journal, into an app I had built myself. After using the app for a few weeks I found that I wasn’t enjoying the user interface and experience as much. This prevented me updating my bullets as often. (There’s a whole different story about Notion which I’ll get to in a separate post.)

I literally wanted to rebuild my website from the ground up using different tech because I was unhappy with how the content couples to the code and URL structure.

As is evident, this collection of non-blocking distractions caused my progress in writing this article to halt. I did a few bits, including a migration to the latest Svelte framework and a conversion of my Tailwind in CSS to pure Tailwind (another story) but never returned to update this post.

If it was considered that these items were separate things and not dependent on each other I may have progressed faster.

Fear of rejection

I tell myself I’m busy and often I can be. As I’ve said previously about my comment about what I call “mood weather” other things have taken my attention (specifically running open mics at this time). The day job has also seen my attention shift there as I focus on upcoming project work with the team. The greatest barrier to all of my problems and one that I’m not particularly conscious of most of the time is fear. Fear of rejection and fear of failure cripple me.

Despite claiming I am happy with only finishing 20% of a thing, over time it gives me dread. Looking back at large lists of unfinished things and partially thought-out ideas makes me close the tab and move on. This might be a dopamine problem, but there are other factors too.

Importance is another. What is deemed important is a heavy driver for me. It’s a difficult concept for personal projects where there aren’t others involved. Is my latest music album important? Or my Doom levels? There aren’t deadlines or other people depending on them. When I’m working on the Leicester Open Mics website or the Countesthorpe Festival Chorus emails there are others who’s work depends on it. This pushing it up the importance list and gets it done.

Fear is a horrid thing. It’s supposed to stop us walking into traffic or approaching a lion in the wild. For things on a screen, there isn’t much that fear should prevent. When it comes to being creative fear is often down to “am I good enough?” or “will this be well received?”.

There are a lot of conversations around art and what is good and what is not. It’s all objective. My creative output is not being judged nor do I require it to do well to earn a living. There is no pressure other than my own. The more I produce, and the quicker I adapt and learn what I’m doing, the better my output will be. My SoundCloud demos are a great example of this where the quality arguably improves significantly over the years (or even decades). This is art 101 - do more, get comfortable. YouTube personalities often go on about their terrible first efforts. I value this approach.

To summarise

It doesn’t matter if a thing is late or never finished. If it has importance it will get done, but importance shouldn’t be the only driver. Break things down and prevent distractions of non-blocking items to get things done. Enjoy the process not the product. Do more in short bursts. Get comfortable. No-one is judging you.