At first glance, this rings very true -- I've seen it myself in open-source work. As long as I'm privately chugging along solving problems, things go well, but

At first glance, this rings very true -- I've seen it myself in open-source work. As long as I'm privately chugging along solving problems, things go well, but as soon as I see the project as an attention-getter, I find myself focusing on the attention instead of the actual project. This has happened to several times over the last decade, and it has always led to me abandoning whatever it was I was working on. (Not that I don't take it up again later, but by then it's a different project.) But I have a counterexample, too: my house renovation, which I'm blogging. (Cf. http://big-old-house.blogspot.com http://big-old-house.blogspot.com) Clearly, I'm being public about my plans there, and yet, knowing that people are going to look at what I've gotten done today is a real motivator in getting something done every day, even if it's trivial. So in that instance, the publicity has really helped motivate me (as Maro noted earlier with the Ironman prep). Perhaps human involvement in big projects isn't necessarily a demotivator; in my house case, I'd say that I assign my social value to each task only as it's done and I can show people what I did -- by breaking the big project down into little tasks, and not talking about the little tasks until they're complete, I can get the best of both worlds (i.e. having the social support and advice of people, without the loss of motivation due to talking about unhatched chickens).