I suffer a great deal from the second part of that last paragraph.  I can easily be overcome by the fear of failure that it will prevent me from even starting, from making even the smallest amount of progress on a project.   It’s a funny thing, because that fear can be completely replaced with amazing focus, long nights and constant thoughts about the next task you can knock off that list as soon as you make even the smallest amount of progress.  Just seeing a small amount of progress being made can swing your attitude from one end of the spectrum to the other.  Gary Vaynerchuk has a great video that really put this concept into words for me,  Better Than Zero.  it doesn’t always have to be about the big win right?

One of my own personal tricks when working on a project that i’m having trouble getting motivated on is to re factor some of the code I’ve already written, it’s a small amount of effort that has a big impact on boosting my motivation.  Refactoring cleans things up, get’s your head into writing code and generally in my case motivates me to write a whole bunch of new code using some of the patterns I may have re factored to while getting myself in the mood as it were

So how do you get yourself out of these types of ruts?  Got any tips or tricks for getting yourself into the zone?