I have worked on lots of personal projects (1), most of which are related to electronics. I do not do electronics for my job and I do not have a lot of free time. So, I've found three things to be effective at maximizing my happiness:
1. Have multiple projects on the go at once.
I've found that building multiple things at once enables me to best make use of my available time and resources (such as the equipment/components I have and spare money). One of the projects will usually have some portion that I can spend time on, or research, or buy something for. This is especially true of the researching part.
Depending on my mood I will either (a) not work on the projects at all since there are plenty of other valuable things to do (such as cooking, interacting with people, exercising) or (b) pick from the available choices the one that I'm most in the mood for (e.g. tonight I'd like to finish that amplifier, or tonight I need to read up on X).
2. Don't worry about when they get completed.
This has made me achieve more not less. The more I worried I wasn't completing things the more I stressed myself out and set unrealistic deadlines and then missed them and got upset. Going slow has helped.
3. Pick work that fits in the available time.
I might have an entire evening free, or I might have 20 minutes. There's usually something from the multiple projects that will fit in that available time.
For example, when I worked on my high-altitude balloon project GAGA-1(2) it took me a 9 months of grabbing an hour here, an evening there. The result was fantastic and I don't feel bad about it having taken 9 months instead of a month of total cramming.
gaga experiment's nice, I'm planning such a thing and reading your post I was thinking that the balloon (no luck) could gets sucked into a jet/rotor engine of a flying by aircraft.
1. Have multiple projects on the go at once.
I've found that building multiple things at once enables me to best make use of my available time and resources (such as the equipment/components I have and spare money). One of the projects will usually have some portion that I can spend time on, or research, or buy something for. This is especially true of the researching part.
Depending on my mood I will either (a) not work on the projects at all since there are plenty of other valuable things to do (such as cooking, interacting with people, exercising) or (b) pick from the available choices the one that I'm most in the mood for (e.g. tonight I'd like to finish that amplifier, or tonight I need to read up on X).
2. Don't worry about when they get completed.
This has made me achieve more not less. The more I worried I wasn't completing things the more I stressed myself out and set unrealistic deadlines and then missed them and got upset. Going slow has helped.
3. Pick work that fits in the available time.
I might have an entire evening free, or I might have 20 minutes. There's usually something from the multiple projects that will fit in that available time.
For example, when I worked on my high-altitude balloon project GAGA-1(2) it took me a 9 months of grabbing an hour here, an evening there. The result was fantastic and I don't feel bad about it having taken 9 months instead of a month of total cramming.
(1) http://jgc.org/labs.html (2) http://blog.jgc.org/2011/04/gaga-1-flight.html