Version control your motivation

Look, I’m not going to pretend like I’ve cracked the code to productivity or motivation. I’ve abandoned more projects than I’ve finished - ideas that started with excitement and died somewhere between “this is going to be epic” and “meh, I’ll get around to it later”

If you build things - games, apps, side-projects of your own, you probably know what I’m talking about. Unless you’re convinced the idea is some billion-dollar unicorn, the motivation curve usually crashes hard after the honeymoon phase. I have one too many potentially cool projects that have become abandonware this way.

But recently, I started doing something which helped me. Not because I forced myself to push through, or because I read a book, or watched some motivational video on 2x. It was something… smaller.

I just started documenting everything I built.

From day zero, be it screenshots, short clips, random work-in-progress footage. Nothing fancy, no plans to share it either. It was more of a private self-documentation more than anything - a log of how the thing was taking shape.

But then every time I hit a slump or when the excitement wore off, when I didn’t feel like continuing, I’d look back at that footage and it helped, every time.

Seeing how far I had come; how much I had figured out or how big of a difference it is (from something rather basic and ugly looking to a polished version of it) made me want to keep going. It was no longer a retrospect in my head, and I could see the evolution of the work. The fact that I’d taken something from zero to wherever it was now.

I’m aware that we all know we started from scratch. But watching it from a third-person view, seeing the Unity scene turn into a moving character and then being put in an environment, or seeing my first preview of the dashboard morph into something worth looking at. Undeniable, visual, progress.

Suddenly, it feels wrong to let it go. Like you’re doing a disservice to your past self who put in the work.

And as an additional bonus - I now have hours of development footage I could easily edit and turn into videos. No pressure, but if I ever want to post a devlog or show someone how a thing was built, I already have the material.

Ultimately, I’m not saying that this is the answer.

There are thousands of tips out there by productivity gurus on how to stay motivated, but this actually worked for me, genuinely. And if you’re someone who loves building stuff but struggles to finish, maybe this could help you too.

Just hit record next time. Not for the world, for the version of you that refuses to quit :)