Organising VS Results: Motivation Turbulence

Lately, due to working on my latest project, a 2D JavaScript game library called TinksJS, I've been thinking about the concept of organising vs results. You might also call organising "refactoring". You might call results "getting things done".

This blog entry explains why, this time, and likely more often in future times, I chose organising over results. There is a balance, but I think you should not feel guilty about organising. Especially on a hobby project where there's no deadline and you don't have a boss hollering at you lol.

Okay, so. With this project, not only am I developing the library itself, but I'm also developing the website that contains the reference, tutorials, samples and so on.

The early stages of all this went super smoothly. I felt super motivated. And then, this last week or so, something changed. I started to feel a little less motivated. Not exactly "omg I don't wanna work on this any more". More like… motivation turbulence.

I had just reached developing the audio functions, and adding a new section to the site for Examples - related to the audio functions.

So… what changed? Why was the project suddenly a little less exciting than it was right at the start? Good question. I had a think, and came to the following conclusion:

• Too much going on: While developing the site was helping me organise the library, the site itself was becoming a bit of its own beast. The site needs syntax highlighting, live code editing, every page needs meta, loads several scripts. What was responsible for what was beginning to get a bit out of hand
• Struggling to design the audio functions: I knew I wanted to split the audio functions into sound effects and music. But I was having a bit of a time figuring out how best to do this, to make it easy for the person using the library, to structure the code so that it had no circular dependencies, blah blah
• Slight issues I'd noticed, but hadn't fixed yet: I'd noticed some issues related to the default drawing settings. It's on my todo list to fix them

None of these problems are massive. I can solve all of them. But I think the demotivation came from the fact that things had gotten a little messy. I had an overload of stuff to think about. So, where to start?

And this is the point of this blog entry.

A past me might have pressured myself to get results. This means I would have not cared if the site was somewhat messy. I would have highly prioritised finishing the library, and pushed through with the audio functions, making them work even if they weren't all that tidy for now. Testing them with console.logs and the minimum UI required to see if they worked. I possibly would have not cared about circular dependencies. Get it working, fix stuff like that later.

The problem is I didn't feel like doing that. I felt like tidying up the site. So… instead of feeling guilty and doing nothing, I decided to do just that. I completely forgot about the library, and I tidied up the site. And I mean completely tidied it up. I won't go into detail, but the site now does everything I need it to, and is super easy to maintain and add to.

The thing is, now the site is as good as I can get it, I've gotten something off my todo list, and I find myself very motivated to work on the library again. I'm ready to get those audio functions working, and since the site is all working, I have a great place to test them.

By sorting the site out, I've sorted out an entire layer of this project. And now I have less overload, less to think about.

Conclusion

The point of all this is to suggest that perhaps you shouldn't feel guilty about spending time organising your project.

New projects are exciting because at the beginning everything is simple. By making sure the underlying layers of your project are well organised and simple - refactoring, you can keep the project simple, and enjoy working on it again.