Two weeks away and I still have not opened the project three weeks later, how do you restart?

The barrier is re-entry cost, not motivation, and the fix is to make the first session trivially small rather than to find more energy.

What works:

Open it and do one tiny thing. Fix a typo. Update a dependency. Rename a variable that has annoyed you. Twenty minutes, deliberately below the level where you have to remember the architecture.

The point is not the work. It is that opening the project stops being a decision, and the second session is much easier than the first.

Explicitly forbid yourself from doing the real thing on the first evening. The reason you keep deciding not to start is that starting means confronting where you were, which is genuinely a large task after three weeks. Remove that requirement and the barrier collapses.

Read before you write. A session spent just reading your own code and remembering how it works is a legitimate session. Nobody counts it and it does most of the work.

Do it at the time you would normally, so the slot survives.

Three or four small evenings and you will be back to normal. Trying to leap straight back to a full session is what has kept you out for three weeks.

For next time, and this is the thing that shortens the gap from weeks to one evening: never stop without writing down the next step.

Before a holiday, or even before an ordinary evening ends:

One sentence on what you were doing.

The literal next action. Not the goal: the actual next thing to open or type.

Anything in your head that is not written down. The concern, the half-formed idea, the thing you were about to test. This is the expensive part to reconstruct and it is nowhere on disk.

How to run the thing. Sounds unnecessary. After three weeks it is not, and hunting for the right command is exactly the kind of friction that ends an evening before it starts.

Same place every time, top of a file or a note you cannot miss.

The reason this works is that it moves the cost to when you have the context loaded and it is free, instead of to the moment when you have none and it is expensive.

And before a planned break specifically: leave it in a working state. Coming back to a half-finished refactor that does not compile is the surest way to not come back at all. Finish the small thing or revert it, then leave.

One reframe worth having, because this will happen again and the guilt makes it worse.

A break is not a failure of discipline and the restart cost is normal. Everybody doing this around a job has three-week gaps. The people who look consistent have simply got the re-entry cost down, not eliminated the gaps.

Two things that reduce it structurally:

Keep the project small enough to hold in your head. A large tangled project has a high re-entry cost permanently. Every simplification you make is also a reduction in how hard it is to come back.

Have something ambient going on. Answering a user email, reading the analytics, a five minute thing on a Sunday. It keeps a thread connected and means you are never fully cold.

And a genuine question worth asking after three weeks of not opening it: is this a re-entry problem or are you finished with it? Both feel identical from the inside. The test is the tiny-task evening in the first answer: do the twenty minutes, and notice whether you want to keep going or whether you are relieved when it is over. That answer is worth knowing either way, and you cannot get it by thinking about it in the evening.