Tell me what programming project I should finish

You ask us to tell you what programming project you should finish, but it doesn't really matter.

Any project will become a chore after the initial novelty driven excitement fades. The trick is not to demand that it will be so fun that it pulls you in like a black hole.

Motivation problem you talk about can be overtaken with the sheer willpower or using habit.

While ninjas can cut their leg off when trapped to avoid being caught, us regular folks do better using habits and not willpower like you tried before.

There is a whole book on the subject, it is called Atomic Habits. It teaches you how to form habits with least amount of toil. Maybe hearing Blinkist short version will be enough, maybe not.

Once working on the project becomes a habit it costs no energy to start, you just do it like you (I) pee first thing in the morning, it comes out efortlessly. But be wary, all work and no play makes Jimmy a dull boy. Have some treats for yourself for what you acomplished. Maybe measure the time spent on the project with a Pomodoro app and go to see a movie after every 20 pomodoros? Double that after each time you get the prize, but ask yourself if you find it.fair and be fair with yourself when it comes to rewarding yourself.

A difficult to form habit will disappear quickly if you give up on it just for few days.

Good luck, may the force be with you.

Define what you mean by finish for each of them. Then rank them shortest project first. And race to finish the first one. Rinse and repeat.

The following steps work for me. - List all the projects on a spreadsheet - Under each project list tasks you have to do - Assign a status eg Backlog, Doing, Done to each task (maybe assign colors for status (green for Done, orange for Doing, red for backlog)) - Get to work

In terms of which project to finish, I would start with one I would benefit from immediately eg If I have a task I do manually and come up with an automated way to completing that task, I would totally do that first.

Good luck

Unless you can't _not_ finish a project, you aren't going to. Having other people tell you what's important to you isn't going to work. You don't have a project that is important to you to finish, (yet). So don't.

Great post. Hadn't heard of JOSS - enjoyed reading the Wikipedia article.

> The terminals used green ink for user input and black for the computer's response. Any command that was not understood elicited the response Eh? or SORRY.

So cool. Would be cool to have the same font/coloring output as that page in the wikipedia article.

> Web 'timesharing' system

This would be cool too. I'd love some interactive demo as to how this worked.

> In order to support multiple user programs, the PDP-6 hardware was modified to examine bit-20 of any address reference. If this bit was set, the address was in "user space" and was modified so that address zero pointed to the base address of that user.

Interesting!

Mik is cool because of Zig.

https://www.pandoricity.com/2022/12/comment-to-change-my-lif...

Maybe you just don't want to finish the projects you started because they're not as fun as you imagined?

Build something you’re going to use yourself on a daily basis. I’m working on something that I’m the prime user of, which works wonders for my motivation.

That’s the entire fun of it! If someone else could value your priorities, the value is in them now and no longer you!

Jossy all the way. If you don't do it, no one else will.