How to actually finish a side project

You have started more side projects than you can count. Some made it past the initial commit. A few got a working prototype. Almost none shipped.

This is not a character flaw. It is a pattern, and patterns have causes. If you have ever asked yourself why developers never finish side projects, the answer is not laziness. It is friction.

Once you see the causes clearly, you can build around them. Here are four tips to finish coding side projects, with a concrete strategy for each.

1. Scope creep: the project grows faster than you can build it

Every idea spawns ten more. You start building a simple bookmarking tool and end up designing a full-text search engine, a Chrome extension, and a mobile app. The original weekend project now has a six-month roadmap.

Scope creep kills side projects because it turns a finishable thing into an infinite thing. And infinite things never ship.

The fix: define “done” before you write a single line of code. Write down the one thing your project needs to do to count as shipped. Not the dream version. The smallest version that solves a real problem.

If you cannot describe “done” in a single sentence, your scope is too big. Cut it until you can. (For more on this, read our post on scoping side projects so they actually get out the door.)

2. Perfectionism: polishing instead of shipping

This one is sneaky because it feels like progress. You spend three evenings getting the CSS animation just right. Then another two on test coverage for an edge case nobody will hit. Then you decide the architecture needs a refactor before you can add the last feature.

None of this is wasted work in isolation. But in aggregate, it is a strategy for never finishing.

The fix: set a ship date and work backward. Pick a date that is uncomfortably soon. Two weeks. A month at most. Then ask: “What is the minimum I need for this to work on that date?” Everything else goes in a LATER.md file and gets ignored until v1 is live.

Shipping something imperfect teaches you more than perfecting something nobody uses.

3. Lost context: you forget where you were

This is the silent killer. You step away for a week, come back, and spend your entire session just figuring out what you were doing. After a few rounds of this, the project feels foreign. The cost to re-enter keeps climbing until it is easier to start something new.

We wrote an entire post about this called context debt. The short version: every time you close your laptop, your working memory evaporates. Tasks lists do not capture it. Documentation is too heavy. The result is a cold boot every session.

The fix: checkpoint your context before you stop. Spend 60 seconds at the end of each session writing a note to your future self. Not a task list. A brain dump: what you were doing, what is half-finished, what the next concrete step is.

This is exactly what KeepGoing does. It prompts you to capture where you left off and surfaces that context when you come back. The goal is to make returning to a project feel like unpausing instead of starting over.

4. No accountability: nobody is waiting for this

At work, someone is always waiting on your code. Deadlines exist. Standups exist. Side projects have none of that. The only person who cares whether you ship is you, and you are surprisingly easy to let down.

The fix: create a lightweight external commitment. Tell a friend what you are building and when you plan to ship it. Post a build log on Twitter or a dev forum. Join a community of people working on their own projects.

You do not need a full accountability system. You just need one moment of mild social pressure to tip the balance from “I will do it later” to “I said I would do it this week.”

The common thread

All four problems share the same root: side projects have no structure by default, so any friction is enough to kill them.

At work, the structure is provided for you. On your own, you have to build it yourself. The good news is that the structure does not have to be heavy. A one-sentence definition of done, a ship date, a context checkpoint, and one person who knows about the project. That is enough.

The biggest shift is mental. Stop treating side projects like open-ended explorations and start treating them like things you intend to finish. The reasons side projects die are predictable. Which means they are preventable.

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The hardest part is not writing the code. It is closing the loop.