I really enjoyed this post. The process of making things, and the motivation behind interests me. Also, congrats on making this whiteboard!

Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Did you, at any point, thought "is this really worth my time"? From your description, I suppose the fun justifies the whole thing, and the fact that you made a usable thing adds to the value. I'm often overthinking fun and how I spend my time, so I wonder how to mitigate these feelings of "am I doing the right choice doing that at all?"

I think that if I had done something where I had to do some inefficient things for nothing but the sake of fun, then I may have had thoughts like that, but I don't think this time was like that. I make barely more than the minimum wage in my state, a whiteboard of the quality that I wanted would have been something like one sixth of my weekly income, and I used garbage to make something that would let me practice math more efficiently and spend less money on paper and make less new garbage. (I really can fill a notebook in a few weeks.)

This seems to really be a question about confidence rather than fun. Nate Soares's Confidence All the Way Up is worth reading on this.

I have more thoughts on this, but they're not really developed and there are more things that I need to understand.