How to keep your motivation high as a software developer

As software developers, maintaining high motivation is crucial for our productivity. Given the repetitive nature of our everyday work, it’s easy to experience a decline in motivation, leading to occasional dips in performance.

Here are some thoughts on restoring or sustaining motivation:

PS: This article is specifically tailored for people working with a team. If you are working freelance, that’s another story, and I won’t be getting into that.

1- Feedback

Feeling like you are not making progress might be demotivating. To counter this, you need to constantly seek feedback from your manager, team lead, or CTO of your company.

This will provide you with insights about what is expected of you, highlight your strengths, and help you identify areas for improvement.

Every time you get feedback, you can see the progress you’ve made, which, in this case, should increase your motivation.

2- Do Beyond Routine Tasks

Doing nothing else but the work that somebody else hands to you might also be demotivating.

Things you can do:

• Code outside your work. Create projects. They don’t have to be big projects. Even little POCs should do.
• Expand your skills. For instance, learn front-end development if you are a back-end developer, and vice versa.
• Read white papers. Get a deep understanding of the technologies you use every day.

3- Do The Tasks You Enjoy

As software developers, we can get bored working on specific parts of the software. Or, we might want to work on specific areas of the software and not others.

Instead of forcing yourself to just do the task, let your team know. Get assigned to the tasks that you enjoy.

I wanted to keep the points highly generalized and avoid specific reasons (e.g., mobbing, overworking, external reasons) why you might feel unmotivated. No matter what the reason, the key point is to communicate with your team.