Going where the motivation takes me

The standard advice is to pick one project and commit. I haven't, and I've stopped pretending I'm about to.

I'm running rcordr, a comics shop called madcap, sidewrks, and a small pile of domains I occasionally think about selling. Only rcordr and sidewrks are properly live. madcap is mid-build. The domains mostly sit parked. None of it looks like focus.

For a while I felt like I should apologise for this. The advice is loud and mostly one-directional: consolidate, go deep, do the one thing properly. I've tried. It didn't stick. What I've landed on instead is less a strategy than a working constraint.

Side projects run on a different fuel

Work runs on discipline. You show up whether you feel like it or not, because other people are depending on you and you're being paid. Side projects don't have that scaffolding. There's no one waiting, no deadline that matters, no consequence for not opening the laptop on a given evening. The only thing that reliably gets me back to the keyboard is genuine interest in the thing in front of me.

So when the interest shifts, I've learned to let it. If I force myself to keep working on the project I think I should be working on when the pull is somewhere else, what tends to happen is that I stop working on any of it. The alternative to working on madcap some evenings isn't working on rcordr those evenings. It's watching something.

That's the honest version. Go where the motivation takes me, or often go nowhere at all.

The problem is that motivation and avoidance look identical

I've been avoiding rcordr for a few weeks. Some of that time I told myself I was being pulled toward madcap. Looking at it plainly, I was also running from three things at once on rcordr: the current work isn't exciting, the UX needs a proper rethink which feels exhausting to sit down with, and the next real step is showing it to people. Each of those on its own is enough to make another project suddenly look interesting. Stacked, they explain almost everything about where my attention has been going.

Madcap is in the fun phase. The part where everything is new, nothing has been tested, and nobody is looking yet. Of course I'm drawn to it. The pull is genuine, and it's also a very comfortable place to hide from the bit of rcordr that actually matters now.

I'd like to say I've got a clean way to tell the two apart. I haven't. The best I've managed is to notice when the project I'm drifting toward happens to be the one with no exposure attached, and treat that as a signal rather than a coincidence.

What the overlap is actually worth

There is a real benefit to running more than one thing, though it's smaller than the self-justifying version suggests.

sidewrks gives me somewhere to write about rcordr, which in turn makes me think about rcordr more clearly than I would otherwise. Building madcap pushed me into a technical area I'll probably use elsewhere. When projects overlap in a genuine way, they compound. When they don't, the overlap is mostly a story I'm telling myself.

I try to be honest about which is which. It isn't always.

The approach is stage-dependent

None of my projects have pulled hard enough to demand the others go quiet. If rcordr started showing real traction, or if madcap started taking actual orders at volume, I'd expect this whole arrangement to rearrange itself around whichever one was asking for more. I'd probably be relieved when it did.

So what I'm describing isn't a principle. It's the right shape for the stage I'm in, which is: early, uncertain, and reliant on enthusiasm as the main thing keeping any of it alive. If that changes, the case for consolidating gets stronger. Until it does, spreading attention across a few things is what keeps me working on any of them.

What I'm not sure about

The cost I can't fully account for is the one where nothing gets the sustained push that might break it through. Every week I spend on madcap is a week rcordr doesn't get the UX rethink it needs. Every evening on a domain idea is an evening I'm not showing rcordr to anyone. The multi-project approach protects against the worst outcome, which is stopping entirely. It probably also prevents the best outcome, which is one thing going somewhere real because I stayed with it through the boring, exposed, uncomfortable middle.

I don't know how to resolve that. For now I'm working with it rather than against it, and trying to notice when going where the motivation takes me is a reason and when it's an excuse.