After our mom died, my sister and I cleaned out her craft room and found cabinets and drawers filled with projects never completed or even started. “Why couldn’t she finish things?” I thought.
Recently, I looked around my own house and realized the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Watercolor supplies in a cabinet are waiting for me to be inspired. Interesting sounding books are stacking up on my nightstand. And a subscription to an online class has yet to be started.
I’m willing to bet you’ve got some unfinished things hanging around, too. Why are humans so bad at getting over the finish line? It likely a case of waiting for the perfect time.
“We imagine that there is going to be a point at which we have sorted out our lives,” says Oliver Burkeman, author of Meditations For Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. “That quest for control distracts us, but that’s not actually something that we can reach as humans. There’s always going to be too much to do. You’re never going to feel completely ready to launch interesting new ventures.”
Burkeman says it’s as though there’s an obstacle between us and taking action. We think we have to fix this problem or solve that issue first, and then we’ll be ready to start and finish that project we want to do.
“We have to make meaning in our lives right now, in this imperfectionist spirit, while being procrastinators and easily distracted people, and while being people who don’t really feel like we exactly know what we’re doing,” says Burkeman. “That’s the way to dive into doing that stuff now, instead of endlessly postponing the real meaning of life to a point in the future.”
Why You Don’t Finish Things
Burkeman says there are two underlying reasons why people have a hard time finishing things, both of which speak to the issue of not wanting to acknowledge our limited nature as human beings. The first is that at the very beginning of any project, you get to feel like your perfectionistic fantasies could come true.
“You get to feel like this time it could all go brilliantly,” says Burkeman. “When you start to get to the difficult bits, though, it’s very tempting to go and start something else. You can keep that fantasy of perfectionism alive at the cost of never actually completing something.”
The second reason is that at a deep level, the sheer fact of having 50 projects going on makes you feel like you matter. “If 10 different people are waiting for things from you, then you must be really important,” says Burkeman. “There is some weird logic in us that says, ‘If I need years and years and years to complete all these things I want to do in my life, then I must . . . have years [to complete it all].’ It’s almost like a denial of mortality.”
As a result, there’s a real incentive to be starting new stuff. However, it’s a wearing and demotivating way to live, because you never get that satisfaction of actually finishing things, sending them out into the world, and feeling like you accomplished something.
Start Finishing
The first step to get better at finishing tasks is to acknowledge that the practice of keeping everything open is not serving you. Burkeman says it’s placating the anxiety about wanting things to be perfect while coming to know this mindset is keeping you from the deep satisfaction of completion. “Quite often, what changes the behavior is when you come to see that distinction,” he says.
Getting better at finishing things requires that you redefine what “finish” means, says Burkeman. “If the project is to write a book, you may think, ‘I’ve got to finish the book,’” he explains. “That does happen eventually, but it’s a very, very large thing.”
Instead, break down a big project or goal into smaller chunks, interim goals, and milestones. Then, approach each piece as its own completable thing.
“Working in daily deliverables drains the drama out of the whole situation,” says Burkeman. “Instead of finished book, it might be to figure out the structure for chapter two. Then celebrate your small wins. You can get a surprising proportion of the energy boost of completing a project from completing a very small one.”
Another tool is to carve out time for finishing projects. Burkeman recommends a technique suggested by motivational coach Steve Chandler, author of Time Warrior, in which you dedicate one day a week or month to completing unfinished business.
“Tie up as many loose ends in your life and work as you can think of,” says Burkeman. “You think you’d be depleted by such an exhausting exercise, but you’ll feel so energized that all these leaks of energy and attention in your life having been dealt with.”
Know when it’s time to quit
Finally, realize that abandoning things can be a form of finishing if you do it consciously and deliberately, says Burkeman. “Decide, ‘I am removing this from my list of ambitions,’” he says. “A zombie project could be related to the ambitions that a past version of yourself had.”
When you get granular enough, you can live a life of finishing, says Burkeman. “Every single moment you’re finishing that moment forever, and it’s gone,” he says. “When you approach your work in the spirit of, ‘What am I finishing today?’ you’re accepting that that’s already how things are in in time. There’s something energy-boosting about that, because you’re being born along by the current of reality, instead of resisting it and fighting against it all the time.”
