One of the best decisions I've made in the past few years is to stop treating side projects like work projects.

E.g.
- "doesn't something like that already exist?"
- "you shouldn't implement that yourself"

Both make sense at work, but wrong attitude for side projects imo.

Depends on your goals of course, but for me it's: have fun, learn stuff.

I get a lot more out thinking things like:
- "I wonder if I could make a toy version of that"
- "That shouldn't be too hard to build that from scratch"

(Galaxy brain is when you start applying this at work, too.)