Ask HN: How do you retain motivation/knowledge over different projects/fields?
For me, being a solopreneur is the ultimate challenge.  Can you arrange your life in such a way to be able to juggle all of the balls you specified?  I&#x27;ve been struggling with the same questions lately as someone doing part time freelance to fund ambitions of building a product.<p>I recently read the book The E-Myth, which identified for me a serious problem I overlooked for a long time: A programmer is a technician who is an expert in a craft, along with writers, designers, etc.  One day the technician is overcome by an &quot;entrepreneurial seizure&quot; and declares &quot;I do all the work around here anyway, I could totally run a business better than my boss.&quot;  And so the technician goes into business and runs themselves into the ground because they didn&#x27;t realize there are actually three roles necessary for a business to work:<p>1. The Entrepreneur, who sets the vision
2. The Manager, who organizes
3. The Technician, who does the implementation<p>The E-Myth argues that the technician is actually the least important of the three, and even should eventually be replaced with employees if you actually want to run a business.  As someone who wants to be a solopreneur and stay that way, my hope is that it&#x27;s possible to still be the technician, as long as you can actually balance the other two roles.<p>As someone with ADHD-like tendencies, I&#x27;ve recently realized that my life has been in relative chaos for years working for myself.  There were no standard operating procedures since I wanted &quot;freedom&quot; to work how I wanted, but that&#x27;s meant effectiveness is directly tied to my mood at the time.  I neglected the Manager&#x27;s role.<p>I&#x27;ve also come to see that having a clear &quot;why&quot; for doing what I&#x27;m doing is vitally important at least for me.  This is the role of the Entrepreneur.  Otherwise I&#x27;ll just sit thrashing about with various web frameworks and coding standards, forgetting that building a product people want is why I&#x27;m here.<p>Working to balance my technician time with manager time and entrepreneur time has been really helpful for motivation.  Procrastination for me seems to come from being unclear about what I need to do next, and &quot;build product&quot; is not a good todo list item.<p>As far as forgetting, Sebastian Marshall wrote a piece called &quot;Background Ops&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;the-strategic-review&#x2F;background-ops-1-strict-limit-a520f73e138a" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;the-strategic-review&#x2F;background-ops-1-str...</a>.  He makes the observation that otherwise intelligent people will just stop doing things that are good for them for no real reason.  The E-Myth agrees with him here that as much as possible should be put on autopilot so you can use your limited willpower for creative purposes instead of deciding what to eat for breakfast today.<p>I&#x27;ve been mulling on the idea that freedom is not the ability to do whatever you want to all the time, but rather the ability to decide what rules you will impose on yourself.  I can use my creative energy to say &quot;I have determined that I do my best work in the morning, so I will wake up at 6am&quot; and then I&#x27;ll make my lizard brain wake up at 6am whether it wants to or not in the moment.  The lizard brain often will just go with whatever is in front of it if it can just get started!<p>Hopefully this is useful, I&#x27;d love to know more about the specifics of what you&#x27;ve tried and what&#x27;s worked and hasn&#x27;t.  Great question!  I&#x27;d also be happy to chat more over email.