1.) Usually when I'm not feeling motivated it's because I'm hitting a wall. The pomodoro technique helps me with this a lot personally-- it forces me to take br

1.) Usually when I'm not feeling motivated it's because I'm hitting a wall. The pomodoro technique helps me with this a lot personally-- it forces me to take breaks and recharge my creative batteries, but it also equally forces me to sit still and keep attacking that wall during the scheduled study time. 2.) Recently even pomodoro was not helping me. I think I had a project that had poorly written specs, and was also complicated to boot. It was very hard and I struggled a lot for several weeks. I tried writing down a visual map, trying to get a better mental model of it but had trouble grasping it still. I could feel my ability to focus and be motivated starting to go down over the weeks as I got more frustrated with the project not moving forward well. I felt dumb. What worked for me is going home and programming something I cared about instead for a half day on the weekend. I also did some tutorials that I could definitely succeed at. I feel like it rejuvenated my ability to focus and got rid of my frustration, I was finally getting things accomplished again and learning new things, which is a big motivator for me when programming. I like the "achievement" of completing things and I had not been getting that for weeks. I came back to work feeling like less of an impatient idiot and finished the project rather quickly from there.