Comment by mrweiner

Aside from any diagnoses or assessing burnout, I’d suggest thinking about what is actually causing the lack of motivation when you sit down. Working on a business is different from coding, per se. You might lack motivation to work on your business specifically or to generally be figuring out business problems. All coding is not equal — are you coding bug fixes, new features, solutions architecture? These all kind of have different underlying requirements and you might find that some motivate you more than others. For me, bug fixes are necessary but draining. The days where I spend 8 hours putting out those fires absolutely suck. Doing the “create a puzzle and build the solution” stuff is way more exciting, fulfilling, and motivating for me.

Your business revenue can really help you out in this department. If it happens to be that you lack motivation for specific things, can you hire those out and focus on working on the things that actually give you joy and satisfaction?

The suggestion of therapy is a good one, but I think that figuring out the root causes of your lack of motivation is also a good first step. So when you sit down to work and can’t get going, ask yourself “what am I trying to do, why am I doing it, why don’t I want to, and would handing this off to somebody else give me motivation to move onto the next thing.”

Maybe the answer is to sell the business and find something else that’s exciting to work on, or just to give your mind the space to recover.

Best of luck!