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How To Stay Motivated for Long-Term Projects
We love to dream big, making grand commitments to things that we hope will bring us meaning and satisfaction. I think this is a good thing. It gives us the motivation to strive for something, and maybe even improve the world as we do.
The problem is that the longer a project is, and the more individual parts it has, the harder it becomes to actually finish. Heck, the harder it is to even start. Like opening up a word doc with dreams of writing a novel and staring at the blank page — where do you even begin?
I’m not an expert, but I have finished a few large projects. I just completed the finishing touches on a knitted blanket, I’ve written a 50,000-word novel draft for National Novel Writing Month for 5 years in a row, and I’ve shipped big features as a part of my software engineering career.
I have some experience finishing big projects, and I think I can boil it down to three pieces of advice.
Everything is small, if you think about it
This is a little bit cliche at this point, but the easiest way to make big projects more manageable is to remember that all big projects are made up of smaller…
