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kluck

Why I can not control what you mean:

1. Not much free time to code besides job, family and life.

2. Not possible while coding at work. That stuff is just too random and boring to be exciting.

So I suppose to induce "productive mania" you could:

1. Get big chunks of free time.

2. Do stuff you are excited about. Do them because You want to and not because of some other goal (like getting money, attention, rewards etc.).

I manage to get that for very small scripts that I program in order to get some small things done for me personally. Those things (I hesitate to call them tasks or projects) are always done quick, work like a charm and do exactly what I need. It gives me a good feeling.

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You touch on something important.

"Do them because you want to, and not because of some other goal like money attention, rewards, etc."

This is an important preliminary step, toward productive mania, I believe. It's not clear though how to induce this. Are we really in control of what we find intrinsically motivating?

Let's say I have a programming project I'm working on. I'm excited about it, but only moderately so. I have a goal of turning it into a business, and making a moderate passive income from it. How can I turn this decent energy and motivation, into something explosive?

It would seem that I need to muster some intrinsic motivation, some desire to work on the project just for the sake of working on it, not for completing it, or making a business from it. I'm not sure how to accomplish that, or if it's even really possible when you're doing something that isn't entirely novel and new.

It's easy when something is new - You're intrinsically motivated to pursue it because it's, novel and exciting. But when you've done something before, it's less simple to find that intrinsic motivation.

My conclusion about motiviaton in general, after investigating this matter for a couple of years (not scientifically but nonetheless):

Intrinsic Motivation can not be created artifically.

Its funny, because I just recently found a little "trick" that somehow motivates me a little. I found this after I made a lot of lists of things, that I really like to do and during the course of it I realized that all of these things are really just fun and could never be turned into a job or towards creating a side-business (like watching movies, listening to music, hiking etc.). So most of the software projects, no matter how fun they are at first, include some unexciting parts and turn into work. The trick: I say to myself, when I have done boring task X, I will be allowed to do real fun stuff Y. I then try to imagine myself doing fun stuff Y and pretty fast I get into a good productive mood. (Sorry for the long introduction)

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