The excitement of launching your app has passed, the rush of emails and tweets and blog posts has subsided, and now you find yourself asking, “What do I do now?”. Maintaining the motivation and the desire to keep updating and improving your app can be really difficult. We’re going to share just a few techniques that have worked well for us during the development, launch and update cycles of both our web apps, Jumpchart and Staction. Clearly, these ideas may not suit your app or your workflow, so please read on with a grain of salt. But if one or more of these ideas do work for you, all the better!

1. Don’t work too hard
Seems like a pretty straight forward one huh? It is. But you’d be surprised at how many people get this wrong. Just because you have an app doesn’t mean you have to have the twitter, email and support accounts plugged directly into your brain 24/7. Work hard when you’re working and forget about it when you’re not. Taking time out goes a long way towards recharging your batteries and maintaining your motivation. We try pretty hard to limit our work days to 8 hours – remember that you’re working in order to live, not the other way around.

2. Work on other stuff
Don’t let your app take over. If you have other projects you want to work on, make time for them. We split our time between client projects and our own web apps, and it has worked out beautifully for us. The time we spend on web apps seems to come in bursts between client projects and, as a result, we’re motivated to work through problems or new features quickly and efficiently because we know that the time is limited. Working on diverse projects for ourselves and our clients also helps to keep the work interesting and constantly changing – a great way to maintain motivation and ensure that our work never gets boring.

3. Take time to think
One of the fastest drains on motivation is the feeling that what you’re doing doesn’t matter. This can come from working on something that you feel is never going to be completed (either because of changing scope or much higher complexity than you originally thought) or it can stem from working on something that you originally thought would be helpful and necessary that actually turns out to be useless and completely unhelpful. New features and bug fixes take a lot of mental energy and time, so take a reasonable amount of time to think through the proposed work carefully. Let it roll around in your mind and ask some pointed questions and you might find that the new feature isn’t necessary or (better yet) that it is necessary but you’ve come up with a far simpler solution than the one originally proposed.

These are all simple ideas, but taking time for yourself, maintaining a diverse workload and properly thinking through everything you do can go a long way towards striking that perfect balance between work, life and a successful web app. Do you already adhere to any of these points? Have some of your own? Let us know in the comments, we always love to know what others out there are doing!