Oh, you are not alone :) In fact this is a fairly typical problem of people working alone and with no external feedback. Things like killing a day to decide ho

Oh, you are not alone :) In fact this is a fairly typical problem of people working alone and with no external feedback. Things like killing a day to decide how to name a temporary variable is a bane of lonely programmer. Next time when you are starting on a new project, make sure you get a supporter or an adopter. The more the merrier, but one should do. This creates a feeling of being accountable to someone and it tremendously helps to make the milestones... which is another thing - having milestones that you cannot afford to miss is golden. This allows breaking out of that stupid loop of obsessing over details that do not matter (while burning out mentally) and keep a larger view of the project in mind at all times. For example, knowing that you are getting someone's blog coverage in two weeks is a sure way to not only get the beta in its best polished state (of the decade :)), but also to redo the website and what not. Productivity jumps by the orders of magnitude. Between the techniques and what nots I find the most useful thing is writing thoughts down. Say you are working on a project, and currently dealing with a feature A of a module B of a web interface, which is in turn just a smaller part of the whole thing. And then you realize that there is that one other thing that absolutely needs to be done and not forgotten. Write it down. Getting it out of one's head and onto a paper helps freeing up idle cycles that brain would otherwise spend worrying about not forgetting this thought. There is a big, heavily commercialized theory built on top of this simple idea - GTD or Get Things Done - but that's all cruft. Just get Things for iPhone and it should be enough. So, yeah... I hear you, and (a) it is typical (b) you need firm goals you truly commit to. That's it. (edit) If you consider chemicals, then no, you don't want them. If you really really really desperate, try modafinil. Very sparingly, like once a month, just to jump-start the productivity and get things rolling.