Most side projects don’t die with a dramatic failure. They die quietly. You step away for a weekend. Then a week. Then a month. And somewhere in that gap, the project stops feeling like yours.

This is the most common way side projects end — not with a bang, but with a slow fade.

The momentum gap

When you’re deep in a project, everything makes sense. You know what you were working on, what’s broken, what’s next. Your mental model is loaded and active.

But context is fragile. A few days away and the details start to blur. A week, and you’re staring at your own code like it was written by someone else.

The gap between “I was just working on this” and “I have no idea where I left off” is surprisingly small.

Why existing tools don’t help

Most developer tools focus on the doing — writing code, running tests, deploying. Very few care about the resuming.

Task managers give you a list of things to do, but not the context to actually start. Documentation helps, but nobody wants to write a handoff doc to their future self every time they close their laptop.

The result: getting back into a project requires a mini archaeology dig through commits, branches, open tabs, and half-finished thoughts.

The real cost

Every time you hit this wall, a small decision happens in your head:

“Should I spend 30 minutes getting back into context, or just… do something else?”

Most of the time, “something else” wins. Not because you don’t care about the project — but because the friction is just high enough to tip the balance.

Multiply that by every side project you’ve ever started, and you get a graveyard of good ideas that simply lost momentum.

A different approach

What if your tools remembered the context for you? Not in a heavy, structured way — but just enough to lower the activation energy of coming back.

That’s what we’re building with KeepGoing. A quiet, lightweight way to capture where you left off so that returning to a project feels natural instead of daunting.

No streaks. No guilt. No productivity theater.

Just a simple way to keep going.

This is the first post on the KeepGoing blog. We’re building in public and sharing what we learn along the way.