Let’s not sugarcoat programming. At times, development can get dull. There are moments when I’d like to do anything else, like perform open-heart surgery on an endangered animal.

In the proverbial dog days of development, sustainable productivity has to come from really small victories. The simple satisfaction of coding or those delusions of fame won’t keep us productive all the time. There has to be a daily nugget of inspiration—a baseline motivator that exists even when the more general motivators grow stale.

For the first year of our company, I spent a large amount of time building a web-based data modeling application called X2O. To this day, X2O creates the application framework for every web project we build at We Are Mammoth. It generates an interface to build an application’s data model and maintains the database, data access layer, and web services so we can rapidly build customized database-driven apps.

X2O is an application with lofty goals. It is wildly complex in places, with a whole lot going on underneath the hood. Broken down, it’s a synthesis of several dozen applications that help generate different parts of a custom application. Maintaining passion to keep building it is hard because each of these apps is a big application in itself. Building big stuff like this requires small victories.

While I was knee-deep in development, I put a new rule into my day-to-day efforts on X2O: make two things better about the software each day.

They didn’t have to be big improvements. They could be very little ones, such as creating more elegant, friendly error messages on the UI or getting rid of stale code. Even making sure all the methods have good comments was an improvement. Some days I’d have the energy to tackle a big task and a little one. Other days, I’d do maybe two minor ones. In the end, every day I knew that X2O that day was quantifiably better than X2O the day before.

There’s significance in the number two as well. One improvement can sometimes be daunting. Which one do we choose? One is also too close to zero. One makes it easy to convince ourselves that we could skip today and make up that extra one tomorrow. On the other hand, three is a lot to sustain every day. Two is a magical number.

Deciding to make your product better in two ways every day is a good mental exercise to keep those large projects moving forward. In a working week, you’ll have ten better things to say about your product than you do now. In a working month, you’ll have forty better things to say about your product than you do now.