Projects
I like to have projects. These are things I do for fun, but they’re not always fun to work on.
Sometimes I have to push through the painful Valley of Slow Progress, where the project becomes Not Fun.
This is where showing-up eventually pays off. If the project has any hope of being fun, showing up will eventually re-ignite the excitement. It’s remarkable how one good hour with a project can turn my feeling about it from, "ugh, I want to throw this away," to, "I love this and I don’t want to stop hacking on it."
Doesn’t matter what the project is: I’ve experienced this with both traditional art and programming.
Oh, and don’t forget to archive-your-projects!
See also:
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The Project Stack! (an actual paper stack)
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hobbies (Kind of like projects, but more ongoing and probably more focused on having a good time doing the thing and less on actually producing anything)
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nih (Not Invented Here - why I do a lot of things)
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project-balance (or lack thereof)