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Tinker Tuesday for September 3, 2024

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.


Well, it seems this thread is still not doing too badly relative to the other regular threads, so let's stay on a weekly pace.

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Having gone through 2-3 years of always working on/tinkering with something, I’ve experienced some tinkering burnout this past few months. I think it’s fatigue from never seeing any of the things I was working on come to a whole pile of fruition (all content rather than code) - they included:

  • membership group for people trying to overcome overthinking/procrastination
  • podcast & publication about real life personal/couples financial statements (where income comes from / where expenses and investments go)
  • magazine / publication for writers about sports (essays, reflections, memoirs rather than reporting or journalism)

Working on a few things still that did get off the ground, are not yet income generating but still are rewarding enough for me to keep doing them:

  • musings/essays/interviews on psychology and money (sort of: “self worth and net worth”)
  • podcast on poetry as a personal development vehicle (sort of: “poems as teachers”)

Right now mostly I’m drifting rather than driven. Maybe it’s just a phase. (Recovery from a recent chest/lung illness playing a part too…)

Wondering if anyone else has gone through something like this and if so did you just allow it to pass or did you force a return to “productivity” in any way?

Sort of, but not really. I have a small mountain of unfinished projects on my hard drive. Inspiration for them comes and goes, I was able to finish maybe one or two of them. I feel some amount of regret for not being to apply myself enough to have something I can show off, and to some extent the point of this thread is to help me finish the one I'm currently working on... but at the same time, come on, tinkering is supposed to be fun, for me at least. It sounds like you're trying to get some side-hustle off the ground with your projects, and maybe that's the thing causing you burn-out.

Fun? What is this thing of which you speak? 😅