When I take vacations from my full-time job, I work harder at my other job - learning how to code and create applications. However, I struggle to find the energy to sit down and focus on my projects after I work all afternoon/evening every day. It is sometimes harder on the weekends when opportunities to see family and friends arise.

So how do I combat this? I started by having an end-goal of being in an internship or junior developer position that is less physically demanding and more mentally stimulating that my current job. Well, that worked for a while, then the exhaustion and burn-out led to me not focusing on my learning or projects and just relaxing before and after work.

Another plan - get a passion planner to lay out my goals for the year, month, week, and even day. I usually am pretty good at following through on to-do lists, especially things that need to get done. Great! (Plus, there are stickers, and the child in me loves stickers!) Since I got the planner on a Thursday, I figured I would start it the following week and had the weekend to plan. I finished the preparations (i.e. vision board, goals for the year, month, week, days for the first week) for it by Monday - so far, so good! By Thursday of that week, though, I already fell off that track and have not been back to it.

What worked for me? Well, I found out that I could change the favicon (aka: the icon found on the tab on each web page) and I got so excited that I have been finding myself working on my projects before and after work! I feel like I have so many things that I want to do right now that I am struggling with working on one thing at a time on my to-do list. This is a new problem, but much better than my problem of not finding the motivation to continue working on my projects.

My motivation definitely increased by being able to create my own favicon, but why? It gave me the opportunity to have my own brand and display it on the projects that I am working on. Since it has my signature on it, I want it to be good, and I want to have a variety of applications to show off.

Putting my brand/name on my applications has helped me with my motivation. What works for you?