Here's how to find it — and actually ship the thing this time.
A guide and Notion template for developers with a repo graveyard. Not motivation, not a mindset reset. A protocol for picking a dead project back up and getting it out the door in 30 days.
Right like, there's a specific feeling when you open VS Code and see a folder you haven't touched in four months and you just close the tab. Not because you forgot how to code. Not because the idea was bad. The idea was fine. The problem is you lost the mental model — what you were building, why, which decision you were stuck on, what you even meant by that TODO comment you left yourself at 11pm that just says "fix this."
Most advice for this situation is "just ship something" or "break it into small tasks" and I get it but that doesn't actually help you when you have four repos in this state and you don't even know which one to pick back up first, you know like where do you even start. The problem isn't motivation. The problem is you don't have a recovery process.
I have built this way for years — Lead Engineer by day, building side projects at 11pm with whatever hours are left. I have started and stopped projects SSOOOOO many times. This is the kit I built to stop losing them.
The kit names 5 real reasons builders put projects down. Before you restart anything, you need to know which one you're dealing with because the fix is different each time.
Two paths, both seemed fine, you went with neither. The project stalled at the decision, not from skill.
What started as one feature is now a platform. You can't ship a platform in evenings and weekends.
The context that lived in your head evaporated. The code is there, the understanding isn't.
Real constraint — not an excuse. Kids, work, health, something more important than a side project.
The energy ran out. Not because the idea was bad but because nobody was watching and nothing was pulling you forward.
This is not a motivation guide. Every section has an actual output — something you produce, decide, or write by the end of it. The whole thing takes about 2-3 hours the first time through. After that, the Notion template keeps you moving.
The 5 real reasons builders stop — you identify which one you're dealing with. This matters because "scope got too big" needs a different fix than "hit a technical fork and never decided." Get the diagnosis wrong and you'll restart wrong.
Seven questions that tell you where the project actually stands. Not "is it worth continuing" — that's the wrong question. These questions tell you what state it's in, what's recoverable, and what a realistic next 30 days looks like before you commit to anything.
This is the section most builders need most and resist most. You cut the scope to what you can actually ship in 30 days with the hours you actually have. Not the hours you wish you had. Not the hours from before you had kids. The hours available right now. There's a template to walk through it so you're not just guessing.
A structured 30-minute session with Claude to rebuild your mental model of the project — architecture, decisions made, what's left, what the blockers are. You paste in your README, your last few commits, your half-written notes, and you run the session. By the end you know where you are. The prompt is included.
If you stopped at a technical decision you never made, this is the section. A Claude prompt that takes your two options, your constraints, your existing codebase context — and gives you a structured recommendation with reasoning. Not "just decide." A process for deciding so you can move forward and stop having the same conversation with yourself.
You leave this section with three — and only three — tasks for the week. Not a backlog, not a roadmap, not a sprint. Three things. This is also where the Notion "Weekly Three Things" view becomes your whole project management system for the restart.
You write down what you're committing to, by when, and what "done" looks like. There's also a build-in-public framework in here if you want external accountability — specific, honest posts, not the kind that makes it a performance. If you've been building quietly and getting nowhere, this is the reason to start saying it out loud.
For when you actually need to let one go. This is real — not every half-built project should come back. The closing protocol is a 20-minute process for deciding a project is done, archiving it with enough context that you could pick it up years later if you wanted, and moving on without the guilt. Included because sometimes the right move is close, not restart.
This is what Section 4 does. You've been away from the project long enough that the context is gone — you know it's a Node API with some auth thing and a database but you can't remember what decisions you made and why, and the README you wrote yourself isn't helping, blah blah you know how this goes. The prompt below is the structure. You paste in your code, your notes, whatever you have, and you run the session. You come out of it with a written mental model document.
Four views, one workspace. Project Status so you know where things stand at a glance, Decision Log so you stop re-deciding the same things, Weekly Three Things so your to-do list doesn't spiral, and the Why Board for when you need to remember why you started. Duplicate it to your Notion, replace the defaults with your project, done. It's not fancy, it's just functional.
I'm a Lead Engineer. My team builds distributed trading systems — $5.2 trillion in assets, 1,000+ advisory firms, the kind of infrastructure where you do not get to ship AI slop and hope for the best. By day I design systems that run at scale. By night I have a graveyard of side projects that I've built and stopped and restarted and sometimes shipped.
I wrote this kit because I know exactly what it feels like to open a folder you haven't touched in months and have no idea where you left off. The Context Recovery Protocol alone came from a specific afternoon where I had a Node API I'd been building for 6 months, hadn't touched it in 10 weeks, and I couldn't remember why I'd made half the decisions I'd made. I spend an afternoon rebuilding my own mental model and then I wrote down the process so I wouldn't have to do it from scratch next time. That's what you're getting.
Guide + Notion template for picking up a dead project and shipping it
Instant access. PDF + Notion template. No course, no upsell, no drip.