Personally, I've found that things tend to take a lot longer than I expect. There are a few tactics I use to help: * Prepare myself mentally for the task and

Personally, I've found that things tend to take a lot longer than I expect. There are a few tactics I use to help: * Prepare myself mentally for the task and understand that the task is going to take as long as it's going to take. This means being more "result oriented" than adhering to a "time box" approach and giving myself permission to take a lot longer than I might have anticipated. It means I'm not looking at the clock and stressing myself out about how "unproductive" I'm being. Often I find things get done in a timely manner (even if it's not as fast as I'd like) when I can focus on the task rather than trying to optimize to meet some synthetic deadline. * Split bigger tasks into smaller tasks and having a series of small "wins" instead of long stretches with no easily measurable or outward facing results. I'm fighting against my own psychology of getting burnt out or demotivated, so making sure there are small, measurable tasks that can be completed helps keep me on track towards making progress on larger issues. * My apologies if it's too basic, but having a 'todo' list that I can easily see what I need to work on and crossing off the tasks as they're completed helps focus my attention and keep my motivation. * Sometimes I organize tasks with a 'priority' and 'effort' qualifier. There are "easy" wins for a task is high priority and low effort. Medium to low priority tasks with low effort allow for "easy" wins to keep motivation. High priority, high effort tasks can be at least identified and maybe be broken up further. Low priority high effort tasks are something that can be punted to when I have free time or potentially ignored altogether. Most projects aren't going to draw the attention of most people, especially when it comes to finding other developers to work on your project, so one can expect to mostly go it alone. But, just because you're most likely the sole developer, doesn't mean you can't talk to people in your circle about some of the issues or challenges. Your friends are probably in a good position to be sounding boards, give advice, work through problems or even be "rubber duckies" in the worst case.