"Don't make your hobby your job" -- Lots of people.
I've always been interested in computers. I can close my eyes to this day and sense my mother's radiating anger as she spent hours on the support line trying to figure out if what I managed to break was fixable, or if she was going to have to pull out all the floppy discs and reformat the computer, once again. Lucky for me, she never banned me from the computer and let my curiosity of technology flourish while her patience was tested over and over.
As a pre-teen some of the most exciting times on the internet that I can remember is making friends back in the old Yahoo! chat days. It blew my mind that I could hang out in "Hackers' Lounge:1" and meet so many people from around the world that shared similar interests as me. I was lucky enough to meet tech-enthusiasts in that chat room that nurtured and directed my interests in programming, some of which I still talk to 25 years later. I can still remember telnet'ing in to a remote computer and being walked through my first "Hello World!" program written in C.
Through my teens and high school years I wrote tons of applications. I remember writing a stand alone Yahoo! chat program, port scanners, default login credential router scanners, an app to track NFL seasonal data for NFL2K on the Dreamcast, a social networking website for kids in my high school (before facebook, had about 50 active users too, nice.) and undoubtedly hundreds of other projects that have slipped from my mind.
Funny enough, even though I was obviously very passionate about programming, I still didn't know what I wanted to do for a profession. I only got more reluctant to decide when I solicited for advice and heard on more than one occasion, "Don't make your hobby your job! You'll eventually hate doing it! Burnout!".
So, I did what made sense to me and enrolled in college without any real sense of direction or purpose. I took the general education classes and earned my Associate's degree, but still couldn't decide if I wanted to turn my hobby into my profession. Paralyzed by still not knowing what I wanted to do and the advice from others haunting me, I took a semester off from college. I'd like to say I did some major soul-searching, took a pilgrimage that led to some sort of self-awakening or something, but I just sat around eating ramen, playing online poker and partying. Knowing that that life wasn't sustainable, at least for me, I finally decided, I'm going to turn my hobby in to my profession.
Fast-forward, 13 years as a paid developer. I bet you might have an idea of what I'm going to say?
I love my job. I still love programming. I love my profession. I love architecting a solution and then engineering it. I love the days when you get in to such a good flow state you look up and 6 hours have passed, and you realize you haven't eaten all day.
However, while the love is still there, my profession has definitely killed my hobby. Over the past 13 years I've thought of thousands of personal projects. I've probably started a handful of them. I've finished 0; just like any good developer.
Is it burnout? No, it isn't. I still enjoy programming. Is it doing my profession for 8 hours, then afterwards continuing to do my profession on personal projects? Mostly, among other things. My brother is an extremely talented car mechanic, and we both came to this realization. It's extremely difficult to work your job for 8 hours and then come home and work on hobbies that are related your profession. My brother has numerous project cars that have been sitting for years, just like I have numerous projects that have been sitting for years.
Like many, my unproductive screen time needs to be drastically cut back. If I include my phone, I probably average an extra 2.5 hours on top of my 8 working hours of screen time a day. Mindlessly zombie scrolling through social networks and news aggregate sites offers little to no benefit. Emphasized to hopefully sear it into my own brain.
One of my biggest problems is paralyzing myself imagining the final product. The clean, polished, sparkling final product. "Ooo, how wonderful it will be, I can see all the traffic this bad boy is gonna get! Whew, it's gonna take a lot of hours to get there. What CI/CD pipeline should I use? I need to separate the front end from the back end for scalability! A/B testing, I need to find a good framework for that! Analytics, definitely gotta start diving in to analytics, it's always been a weak point of mine. Oh yeah, what css framework? Man I hate css. SEO, gotta have perfect SEO, I need to start thinking of good keywords! I'm gonna get on fiverr and start shopping for logos! Wow, yeah this is really going to take a lot of time... Wonder what's on reddit." Before you know it, I've given up before I even started.
What happened to the teenager who just dove in with no real sense of what the final product was going to be? The kid who just STARTED, not knowing where the project was going to end up. I know that kid finished more personal projects in a year than this old man has in 13 years. He's still here. I've excitedly written down many ideas, registered their .com addresses and dreamt about the finished product.
So what's the answer? Limit myself to only 8 hours of screen time on work days so I might feel eager to be productive on weekends? Push out all the software engineering processes in my brain that stall out my plans? I'm not entirely sure yet.
But I might have a plan.
I'm just going to START. Stop overwhelming myself with the dreamy polished products. I'll take my small list of initial requirements and hit the ground running when those fleeting feelings of inspiration hit. Design a quick and dirty MVP solution. Refactor as my requirements change. Just like I've always done as a kid and as a professional. Worry about the dazzling finished product later. I'm going to take it 15 minutes at a time if I need to.
Hell, with this new plan I may even finish this website one day.