On finishing things
Starting is cheap and feels wonderful. Finishing is expensive and feels like nothing at all.
1 min read
The last ten per cent of a project has no reward built into it. The idea is no longer exciting, nobody is watching yet, and everything left is small, fiddly and unglamorous — the naming, the edge cases, the copy nobody will read.
What helps
- Writing down what "done" means before the excitement wears off
- Doing the boring last bits first thing, when the day still has fuel in it
- Accepting that the finished version will be less interesting than the imagined one
That last one took me a decade. Everything you finish is a downgrade from the version in your head, and shipping it anyway is the whole job.
