Re-iterating TeaHands and Walops points. I think for me the biggest one is to start small. Like…pick something small, and then go smaller than that. I find that it can be useful to set a bronze/silver/gold endpoint for yourself:

• Bronze is something you are sure you can complete in the time frame.
• Silver is where you think you can get to if you really push yourself and nothing bad happens
• Gold is where you can go if everything goes right all the time.

This can help with motivation, because “failing” can often make you stop working because you de-motivated yourself, but not quite reaching your furthest estimation is motivation to push yourself.

Also something to keep in mind is that if you don’t make your bronze goal at first, this just means that you have a skill that needs to be improved: scoping. This is something everybody struggles with. I have been a professional gamedev for 10 years and I still scope things to how I think things should go, or I scope time to “feature-complete” (ie it ticks the all the boxes it was supposed to), but not “complete” (there might be bugs, the art doesn’t look right/etc…)

Also, version control is super useful, not just for tracking down bugs as Walop called out, but also for motivation. If you commit at least one thing at the end of everyday, you are basically keeping a journal of your work. This can be useful to look back on and realize even if you feel like you didnt get that much done, you can go back and see “hey I actually did all this stuff over the last week!”