One obvious way to finish things is to seek out an external structure. It’s true that my book is overdue—and yet, being overdue is actually a blessed state, since it depends on the existence of a deadline. Because there is a real editor waiting for my manuscript, the book is not-yet-finished, rather than unfinished. (My plan, in fact, is to finish it this week.)
We’ve all tried to impose deadlines on ourselves. It’s easy enough to scrawl one next to an item on your to-do list, or to enter one into whatever app you use to organize your life. Oddly, this is an almost philosophical act, inasmuch as it forces you to confront the nature of reality. The difference between a real deadline, imposed for legitimate reasons from without, and a fake one, conjured from within, is like the difference between eating brunch and seeing it on Instagram. To create a real deadline, you must generate real accountability. This is by no means impossible: a monthly book-club meeting might be real enough to help you finish more books. But the more complex, ambitious, idiosyncratic, or optional your undertaking, the harder it can be to find a real reason to do it.
It can be useful to attack the issue analytically—to try to figure out, on a rational basis, why you can’t move forward. But this often requires accepting the fundamental irrationality of the wrapping-up process. In many cases, everything gets reversed. Whatever used to be fun (coding your first game, say) is replaced by something that’s not (debugging your code). Options you worked hard to create for yourself (you took so many beautiful photographs!) turn out to be burdens that must be discarded (your photo book can have only forty pages). If you sought to escape rigid perfectionism, you must now tighten every nut and bolt. If you were once inspired, you must become grimly determined. Just as you can hate-watch a show, so you can hate-finish a project, getting it done so that you can banish it from your life.
Amid all this unpleasantness, it can be helpful to think of finishing as bringing two parts of yourself into communication. The finishing half must give feedback to the starting half, and vice versa. I’ve experienced this most recently while noodling on my synthesizers. For a long time, I found that I could write simple songs but not complex ones; the problem was that I didn’t know enough music theory to achieve complexity. After I started learning theory, the creative first part of my songwriting improved immediately—and yet this threw the detail-oriented finishing part into disarray. When I sketched out an interesting song in an unusual scale—Mixolydian Flat 6, which is major on the bottom and minor on top—I neglected to take careful notes about my melody and chords. I found myself floundering as I attempted to nail down the concluding section, when the opening motifs would return in altered form.
It wasn’t fun. Still, the experience taught me to work with the end in mind, and now the front and back halves of my process are in better synch. Next time, it’ll be easier. The old woodworking adage suggests measuring twice to cut once—there’s even a Russian version that argues for measuring seven times. But you won’t find out what you need to measure unless you do some cutting.
Suppose you make finishing a priority. Instead of planning to clean out your basement—an unfinishable task if there ever was one—you decide to fill one trash bag per week. Rather than trying to write a book of poems, you commit to a daily haiku. You’re only starting tasks that you’re certain to complete; you’ve made big projects small, and so removed the risk. In the worst case, if you give up, you’ll have a tidier basement and a clutch of haiku. Many productivity gurus advise breaking big projects up into small steps, but this takes the idea further: if you can rethink what you do such that every task is easily finishable, then nothing will ever go unfinished.
