Keeping a side project alive with ADHD
Side projects usually die from silence, not from a decision to quit: weeks pass with no visible progress, the project stops feeling real, and something newer takes its place in your attention. Keep it alive with one small, scheduled touch a week, even five minutes, so it never goes long enough to disappear from your radar entirely.
Side projects do not usually die on purpose
Almost nobody sits down and decides to abandon a side project. What happens instead is quieter: a week passes without opening it, then two, and by the time a month has gone by, picking it back up feels like starting over rather than continuing, since you have forgotten where things stood and lost the thread of what you were trying to do next. The project is not dead because you stopped caring. It is dead because the gap grew long enough that returning to it became its own separate, harder task.
If weeks go by without opening it
Set a recurring task, even a small one, that keeps the project on your radar weekly: "Spend fifteen minutes on the side project, Sunday." The point is not that fifteen minutes will finish anything meaningful. It is that a project touched once a week never has the chance to fully fade from memory, and each small session leaves you in a better position to pick it back up than a month of silence would.
If a new project idea keeps pulling your attention away
New ideas feel more exciting than continuing an old one, since a new idea has no unsolved problems yet, only possibility. Write the new idea down somewhere separate and finish the sentence before switching, then go back to the fifteen minutes you had planned for the existing project. Most new ideas are still interesting a week later if they were genuinely worth pursuing; very few need to be started the same hour they occur to you.
If you cannot remember where you left off
End every working session, even a short one, with one written line about what to do next: "Next: fix the login screen, the button is not aligned." This single habit does more to keep a side project alive than any amount of planning at the start, because the hardest part of returning to unfinished work is usually not the work itself, it is reconstructing what you were doing and why, which a one line note removes entirely.
If it only feels worth doing during a burst of motivation
A side project that only gets touched during occasional bursts of enthusiasm will progress in fits and starts, with long silent stretches in between that put it at risk of dying the way described above. Motivation is a fine bonus when it shows up, but a small, boring, scheduled fifteen minutes a week outlasts it, because it does not depend on a mood arriving on schedule. A weekly fifteen minutes will not feel as exciting as a weekend spent building in a burst, but it is the version that is still there in six months.
A worked example: the app that sat untouched for two months
Say you started building a small app six months ago, worked on it steadily for the first few weeks, then let two months pass without opening the project. Reopening it now, you do not remember which file you were editing or why a particular function exists. Rather than trying to relearn the entire project in one sitting, spend fifteen minutes just reading through what exists and writing one note: "Last worked on the settings screen, next step is connecting it to the save function." That fifteen minutes is not progress on the app itself, but it turns a project that felt dead back into one with a clear next step, which is the difference between a side project that stays alive in fits and starts and one that gets quietly deleted a year from now. Writing that note takes less time than deciding whether to work on the project at all once the memory of it has faded, which is usually the real reason a stalled side project stays stalled for another month.
Keeping the weekly touch from disappearing itself
A recurring task for a side project is easy to snooze once and then forget entirely, the same way the project itself gets forgotten without one. Marking it as a genuine weekly repeat, rather than a one time reminder you meant to reschedule, means it keeps resurfacing on its own even through a busy month, rather than depending on you remembering it exists. If keeping any recurring commitment going is the harder part, setting up recurring tasks so chores stop living in your head covers the mechanics of that in more depth, and if the project stalls specifically because you cannot decide what to work on first when you sit down, finding the smallest next step of a stuck task addresses that directly.
Common questions
How much time should I spend on a side project each week to keep it going?
Even ten or fifteen minutes counts, as long as it happens on a schedule rather than only when you feel inspired. The goal at this stage is keeping the project from going cold, not making major progress every single week.
Is it bad to have multiple side projects going at once?
Not inherently, but each one needs its own weekly touch or the ones that get neglected will die the same way one would on its own. If you cannot maintain weekly attention on more than one, it is fine to formally pause the others rather than letting them fade without a decision.
What if I genuinely lose interest in a side project?
Losing interest for good reasons is different from letting it die by neglect. If you have given it honest attention and decided it no longer excites you, it is fine to set it down deliberately rather than keeping a weekly task going out of guilt.
This article shares practical organizing ideas. It is not medical advice. For diagnosis or treatment questions, talk with a qualified clinician.