I've found that my side projects are very rarely about completing anything. Usually a side project is about chasing a curiosity in a piece of tech or a workflow change or something. "Could I build a faster CI pipe in Terraform?" "Could I write this Kafka consumer in Java?" "Can I containerize this?". Things that aren't really about "completing" or "shipping."
I think that people like me often forget that one of the biggest drivers for working on projects past when they become interesting is the money I receive for working on them. If I'm not being paid, it becomes difficult to fathom struggling for 10 hours on building something past when it's particularly interesting. Once any personal project would require basically any UI work, that's about when I bail (as I have no interest and actively dislike pretty much every UI-based technology I've ever encountered).
I think that people like me often forget that one of the biggest drivers for working on projects past when they become interesting is the money I receive for working on them. If I'm not being paid, it becomes difficult to fathom struggling for 10 hours on building something past when it's particularly interesting. Once any personal project would require basically any UI work, that's about when I bail (as I have no interest and actively dislike pretty much every UI-based technology I've ever encountered).
Getting paid to work is important to me.