Motivation is a tricky thing to upkeep. Once I thought that ambitious projects will keep programmer motivated, and too simple tasks will hinder his motivation. Now I have plenty of experience with small and large projects, desktop/web/database programming, c++/c#/java/php languages, oop/non-oop paradigms, day-job/free-time programming.. but I still can't answer the question of motivation. Which programming tasks I like, and which don't? It seems to depend on too many variables.

One thing remains constant though. It's that starting everything from scratch is always more motivating than extending some existing system. Unfortunately it's hard to use this trick in productive programming. :)

So my question is, what tricks programmer can use to stay motivated? For example should we use pen and paper as much as possible, in order not to get fed up with monitor and keyboard?