Ask HN: How do you stay motivated at your startup?

Re:Ask HN: How do you stay motivated at your startup? by bmelton on Tuesday October 04, 2011 @06:29PM (#3073211)

I suspect that most advice like this DOES depend on personality type, but with enough different people offering their insights, presumably the majority of personality types are covered, if one chooses to read enough motivational literature.

My motivation is progress, most of the time. If I'm not making progress, I'll often switch to some easier task that I know I can get done quickly to get my brain in the right space and make 'getting into the zone' a downhill process.

Sometimes, switching back to whatever task was slowing me down is like going back uphill again, but I often find that I'll usually abandon the easy task because, while doing that, the harder task has been mentally solved (once you stop thinking about a problem, yadda yadda).

Of course, where I generally suffer is in getting all the easy tasks done. Solving a problem is fun. Writing a login page isn't, generally speaking. Making a 'reset your password' form isn't. So all those things often get left by the wayside, and I end up with an awesome project that is completely unsellable because the last 10% goes untouched while I work on something else.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you stay motivated at your startup? by no-go-mojo on Wednesday October 05, 2011 @01:39AM (#3074386)

I work that way too, which leaves a lot of unfinished projects, because I do the hard/interesting stuff, and think "oh this is done, I just gotta do x, y and z which I'll wrap up later." Now I've started to set a check point before I start which must be crossed in order of my project to be finished.

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