I’ve noticed that when I’m working on personal projects or (to a lesser extent) complex games, my motivation to continue working or playing drops off significantly as soon as I’ve figured out the solution for the project or the optimal strategies for the games. The sensation is a bit like, say, playing an RPG and doing some postgame quest for the Infinity+1 sword, and then not wanting to play anymore once you have it—I worked hard to get a godweapon but don’t have any urge to use it. This is particularly frustrating for programming projects, that tend to get dropped unfinished after the major problems have been solved.
I don’t really have any point to make with that. It’s just irritating.
You’ve dropped out of the lower end of Flow, the optimal level of challenge for a task.
You’ve solved the intellectually interesting nugget, or believe you have, and now all that’s left are the mundane and often frustrating details of implementation. Naturally you’ll lose some motivation.
So you have to embrace that mundanity, and/or start looking at the project differently.
I agree entirely, having faced exactly the same problem in my day job: some studies are complete, I feel like I have a reasonable guess about the conclusions we can draw from them… maybe I’ve even presented the main findings at a research conference or two. But a real logjam occurs when it’s time to write up and submit for peer review, despite publication being a strict requirement for continuation of my post.
I very much agree with the “flow” analysis: I have an incredible drop-off in motivation once the problem is “solved” to my satisfaction, even if the task is not complete. My initial way to deal with this problem was to bury myself in other tasks, but all of them started piling up at this same stage.
I hadn’t even realised this was happening until I took a full day to take stock of all my different projects, using more of a project management approach and most importantly, setting aside the short term pressures to reflect on longer term issues.
The solution for me has been to set aside time that is solely dedicated to “embracing that mundanity”: setting attainable short-term goals and evaluating success/failures weekly (originally, daily). And when it seems like too much drudgery, explicitly reflecting on the alternatives if I don’t get through the mundane bits.
I’ve noticed that when I’m working on personal projects or (to a lesser extent) complex games, my motivation to continue working or playing drops off significantly as soon as I’ve figured out the solution for the project or the optimal strategies for the games. The sensation is a bit like, say, playing an RPG and doing some postgame quest for the Infinity+1 sword, and then not wanting to play anymore once you have it—I worked hard to get a godweapon but don’t have any urge to use it. This is particularly frustrating for programming projects, that tend to get dropped unfinished after the major problems have been solved.
I don’t really have any point to make with that. It’s just irritating.
You’ve dropped out of the lower end of Flow, the optimal level of challenge for a task.
You’ve solved the intellectually interesting nugget, or believe you have, and now all that’s left are the mundane and often frustrating details of implementation. Naturally you’ll lose some motivation.
So you have to embrace that mundanity, and/or start looking at the project differently.
I agree entirely, having faced exactly the same problem in my day job: some studies are complete, I feel like I have a reasonable guess about the conclusions we can draw from them… maybe I’ve even presented the main findings at a research conference or two. But a real logjam occurs when it’s time to write up and submit for peer review, despite publication being a strict requirement for continuation of my post.
I very much agree with the “flow” analysis: I have an incredible drop-off in motivation once the problem is “solved” to my satisfaction, even if the task is not complete. My initial way to deal with this problem was to bury myself in other tasks, but all of them started piling up at this same stage.
I hadn’t even realised this was happening until I took a full day to take stock of all my different projects, using more of a project management approach and most importantly, setting aside the short term pressures to reflect on longer term issues.
The solution for me has been to set aside time that is solely dedicated to “embracing that mundanity”: setting attainable short-term goals and evaluating success/failures weekly (originally, daily). And when it seems like too much drudgery, explicitly reflecting on the alternatives if I don’t get through the mundane bits.
I think this is relatively common. I was talking about this with a friend a while back.