Be vigilant about scope creep; this requires some self-awareness, as it can be easy to let your excitement take you down interesting but tangential paths. Your

Be vigilant about scope creep; this requires some self-awareness, as it can be easy to let your excitement take you down interesting but tangential paths. Your priority should be to get the core functionality of your project working as soon as possible, even if it's buggy and lacking in features. This proves that you can solve the problem you set out to solve, and allows you to say you've "finished" the project to some degree. Too often people get caught up in doing things the 'right' way, making sure the code is the cleanest they've ever written, etc. None of this matters if it doesn't result in a working product. Now I don't mean to say that additional features, bug fixes, and refactoring aren't important. My point is that focus, motivation, and time are limited resources, and these improvements should come after you've established your core functionality and proven that it's viable.