People often imagine indie developers as free spirits. No managers, no stand-ups, no endless Jira tickets. Just you, your laptop, and the wide-open space to create. That picture isn’t entirely wrong — but it hides the part that actually determines whether you’ll finish anything: routine.

When I first went solo, I thought motivation would carry me. I loved the idea of waking up whenever inspiration struck, coding late into the night, living in flow. But motivation has a way of evaporating when you’re staring at an empty screen, or when the shiny excitement of a new idea fades into the slog of actually building it.

Hashimoto’s article on building large technical projects offers a strategy for this. By breaking down work into repeatable, bite-sized steps, he shows how to make progress automatic. This framing turns routine into an antidote to procrastination. It’s more than a mindset; it’s a way to combat Decision Fatigue. Our brains have a limited supply of willpower for making choices each day. By automating the when and where of your work, you save your best mental energy for the hard creative problems, not the draining choice of whether to start at all.

This also helps to build a powerful Habit Loop: The cue (your morning coffee finishing), triggers the routine (sitting down to code for one hour), which delivers a reward (the satisfaction of solving a tiny problem). Over time, this loop becomes so automatic that the friction of starting disappears. This doesn’t require a rigid 9-to-5 schedule. You can use practical frameworks like Timeboxing, where you commit only to a focused block of time—say, 90 minutes—rather than a daunting outcome. Or you can use a visual motivator like the “Don’t Break the Chain” method: put an ‘X’ on a calendar for every day you stick to your routine. Soon, your only job becomes keeping that chain of Xs unbroken.

Just as this structure helps with progress, it’s also crucial for managing the emotional hurdles—like anxiety and procrastination—that often derail indie developers. By setting explicit work hours, you create clear boundaries between focused work and rest, protecting both your productivity and mental well-being. This isn’t about rigid self-discipline; it’s about designing a system that makes starting easier and reduces the guilt of not working.

Murakami Haruki once put it this way in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:

今天不想跑，所以才去跑，这才是长距离跑者的思维方式。
I don’t want to run today. That’s why I run. That’s the mindset of a long-distance runner.

That line could just as well be about indie development. This mindset is perfectly captured in the philosophy of Atomic Habits. The goal isn’t a single, heroic push to the finish line, but to get just 1% better each day. These small, consistent actions compound like interest, turning tiny efforts into a finished product over time. The real shift happens when your routine isn’t just something you do; it becomes part of your identity. You’re no longer just “trying to finish a game”; you are a developer, and developers show up to do the work.

Freedom is what draws many of us to indie work. But freedom without structure is just chaos in disguise. Routine is what transforms that freedom into something sustainable. It’s not glamorous, and it won’t make for a dramatic movie montage. But it’s the quiet, compounding force that gets you from the first line of code to a finished product in the hands of real people.

And in the end, that’s the work we signed up for — not just chasing inspiration, but building a life where progress happens one steady step at a time.