How to finish the Projects you Start
Posted: Thursday, August 02, 2007
Are you the kind of person who has a lot of great ideas, but has a hard time finishing your projects?
Do you have a folder on your hard drive full of art that you haven’t finished yet?
Do you have ‘temporarily’ abandoned projects, half-finished layouts, 9/10ths of a short story, or ‘ideas’ for a novel?
There are a lot of reasons why we don’t finish the projects we start.
We might take on too many projects at once, only to get frustrated as we don’t make progress on any of them. Or we might keep raising the bar every time we near completion, making it impossible to finish.
Why did updating my website take me 4 months? Well, I can tell you that, and I can also tell you why it didn’t take even longer.
In short, I’ll tell you how I stopped procrastinating and started finishing what I started. 
Adding too Much to your Project
When I started designing then software that I would write to manage my pixel portfolio, it didn’t seem complicated, and should have taken a month to complete, but I fell victim to what’s called ‘feature creep’ by people who make software.
Doesn't it seem obvious? Making your project bigger while your working on it makes it take longer to finish. If you keep adding and adding, your project never gets done! 
Feature creep, isn’t something that happens only in software and websites. It can happen in drawings, stories, and other personal projects too.
- If you’ve ever started a sketch, that became a CG painting, that needed a background just as you noticed a slight anatomy error, and had to repaint. You worked on it for hours, before it got trashed or stashed away because you couldn’t stand to look at it, then you’ve got feature creep.
- If you’ve started a base, then made 50 poses, then decided that there was a huge problem with the foot and started a new one, just as you learned a new way to make cuter faces that you wanted to use, only to still be working on that base weeks later, then you have feature creep.
How to deal with Feature Creep in your Projects
Change your definition of finished. Learn to let some things go. It’s OK to be a bit of a perfectionist, but if you never get anything done, then you’re wasting your time even starting.
The art that you’ve thrown away is probably closer to finished than you think. You just have to deny yourself some of the features.
Put cuter faces in your next base, fix the anatomy mistake in your next painting. This doesn’t mean that you have to abandon your piece. Just like software is allowed to have versions, art can have do-overs. So call it finished for now. You can always take it offline or redo it later.
Taking on Too Many Tasks
Feature creep isn’t the only reason that people don’t finish projects. Another enemy of completion that I’m all too familiar with is too many tasks.
If you’re the kind of person who has lots of ideas, or lots of activities going on, you know how hard it can be to juggle things. Something always suffers. Sometimes its hard to balance the tasks that you assign yourself with the tasks that life assigns you, like family and social obligations, and you may find yourself trying to juggle too many things.
You might find yourself trying to make extra time for creativity by multitasking, like doodling your next painting while you’re in class, but be careful not to take this too far.
How to Deal with Taking on Too Many Tasks
Focus on one thing at a time. Don’t get stressed out. Just because you have to do something you don’t want to do, like study, before you can do something you do want to do, like write, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t focus on the task at hand.
You may find your pen writing ideas for your book in the margins, when you should be noting the definition of ‘endoplasmic reticula’. You might find yourself reading page 20 of a book you need to finish by tomorrow for almost an hour while you daydream.
If you try to try to multitask too much, you’ll end up extending the time of the studying, that you could be using to write. And not only that, you’ll most likely decrease the quality of the result both tasks.
If you focus on too many things at a time, you can also cause undue stress, which means that you’ll have even less time for your creative task, since you’ll need to use some of your downtime just to recover from the stress you’ve caused yourself.
Take some time to think about all of the things that you have to do, and you might see how some things can be let go, or scheduled at a better time.
Now its up to you
Being a creative person means that you finish things. Otherwise you’re not really 'creating', you're just dreaming. If you wait until you know everything, and you're skill is perfect before you finish anything, you'll be waiting a long time.
You have the talent, and you have to put in the effort. Think about what it is that’s stopping you and eliminate it and put your creation out into the world.
That is how to finish your projects. 