Just found out the other day that the big project I've been working on for the past year (8-12mo, something like that) is going to be canned a few months. But there's still some features yet left to do to bide them through until the end.
Talk about a real motivation killer. I don't care about the project as much. I've long since emotionally detached myself from the bureaucracy that set in mid-way through and started twisting it. What I care about is that we were just finally started doing some real agile process and we have some extra developers start coding (before it was mainly just me) and we're doing some TDD stuff, etc.
So, I figure I can either complain, whine, and feel sorry for myself that I have to write dead meat code, or I can take this opportunity to do some interesting things that I might not have done otherwise. I can't go too hog wild because it wouldn't be justified, but I can do some of the features differently than I would have done otherwise and try to gain some new experience and learning out of it.
Sorry for the rambling, here's the point: I hadn't heard of a term for this awkward situation I'm currently in (something fancy like the term 'Death March' for long-hour projects). I thought that it was kinda like when they made the hero in the Western movies dig his own grave and build his own coffin before they were about to kill him. It's kinda like that... building your own coffin.