How to Finalise and Complete Your Projects
Introduction
“No work of art is ever finished - merely abandoned” - Paul Valery
Finishing things can be very difficult. Some schools of thought claim that such a thing is impossible when it comes to art. That artistic projects can never be completed, they are merely abandoned. Without getting into the theorems and philosophies too deeply, all of us realise that whether we abandon or finish projects, at some point we have to call it quits and leave them be to move on to new things.
If you find yourself stressing about deadlines or your academic or professional pursuits hindered by your own ability to finalise and complete your projects, then hopefully this text will help you find some closure and help you finish your projects.
We’re going to be looking closer at 5 practical tips that will help you finalise your projects, and if you’re anything like me, a creative who struggles to complete what they start for a multitude of reasons, then hopefully, there is something you can take away from this. But why is it difficult to finish things?
We discussed it briefly in the last essay, but more specifically, why it’s easier to start new projects. There can be a multitude of reasons for this, and we will discuss some of these reasons a bit more in the proposed solutions.
- Have Someone Else Finish It
It might seem obvious or like a cheat, and you might ask yourself - how could someone else even finish your work for you? First off, it depends on how you define and look at “finishing” something. Completing a project involves multiple steps. A statue might be finished in a studio, but the project is complete when it’s mounted in its final resting place, such as a public space. Is a book finished once it’s written or once it’s edited? Perhaps once it’s been published?
There are many instances where you can have someone else finish the project for you. Most writers don’t do their own editing, God knows it’s my least favourite part of any writing project. In part, we lose the excitement and novelty of a project when we have to go over it so many times, but for an editor, the project might be new, and they can approach it with a fresh set of eyes. It’s easy to get tunnel vision when working on a project, and having an outsider help finish it is incredibly valuable.
Sometimes it also helps if we don’t trust ourselves. If you can’t bear yourself to finish a painting, have someone else do the last stroke and say it’s completed. Don’t rely too much on yourself and your own thoughts and feelings about a project, especially if you’re a chronic perfectionist. More than being unrealistic, perfectionism comes from ego; it comes from the fear of not being enough, and from such a desperate state, there is never an end. The mind is never satisfied with completing something, and in such a case, you either have to say enough is enough, or if you can’t bring yourself to do it, have someone else do it.
- The Attitude of the Knife
“Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now it’s complete because it’s ended here’ - Frank Herbert, Dune.
Here’s a crazy truth: you decide when a project is completed.
If you often find yourself lost in detail work, perfectionism and perennial polishing, then you have to adopt the attitude of the knife. Practising detachment and learning to let go is important, not only artistically but in life as well. Perfectionism and the perpetual cycle of working on a project ad nauseam, comes from an unwillingness or fear to let go.
The best thing you can do sometimes is to say enough is enough and simply call something complete. Regardless of how you actually feel about it, you’re the master of your fate, and you get to decide that. Your brain might disagree, and it might even actively try to fight you about it, but sometimes the best you can do is just let go, call it finished and move on towards the next project.
Learn to trust your instinct, your gut feeling on it, and if you’re so fed up with a project that you feel physically incapable of continuing it, abandon it. It will either rot there and fade away, having finished its life cycle, or it will serve as the foundation for a new project.
Half of the battle is knowing when to give up, and the attitude of the knife is best utilised in conjunction with discernment. You shouldn’t abandon things before they are finished, nor should you give up at the first setback. You have to learn when to let go and when to hold on, and that kind of discernment comes only with experience. You only get to that point of experience if you learn to find inner motivation and if you use the power of habits to your advantage.
- Find Inner Motivation Enforced Through Habits
We’re creatures of habit, what we do we will continue to do, and sometimes become enslaved to our environments, or we serve our mind’s more colourful deceits and passions. The only way we can change our habits is to enforce new ones, and we do that by conscious effort and replacing old patterns with new ones. The more projects you leave unfinished, the more difficult it will be for you in the future to complete tasks; it’s an unfortunate reality.
This tip is at its most useful when paired with others, but it’s a powerful fundamental to establishing the other suggestions. The instructions laid out within this essay become the most useful when you develop an inner motivation for them, and you reinforce them into your life through habits. To develop the habit of finishing tasks, you have to find the motivation to want to finish them.
The more tasks you complete, the easier it will become, and the more rewarding completing a task is for you, the more you will have the motivation to do it. There are a lot of things you can do, but three standout points for me are taking the time to: reflect, recognise and celebrate.
Reflecting means looking back at your work, savouring the good parts, and thinking about the things that could be improved. Looking back at the aspects that were fun, engaging or otherwise rewarding helps with motivation because we constantly strive towards that positive state. On the other hand, reflecting on what we could’ve made differently engages us creatively, and it inspires us to work further.
Recognising means acknowledging the fact that you’ve finished a project, and to ceremoniously saying farewell. It provides closure and allows you to clear your mind, the canvas as it were, and to prepare for the next project. This is important for habit building because it clearly defines what is complete and what isn’t. As mentioned, a state of completion is largely a philosophical deliberation, and it’s entirely up to you what constitutes finished and unfinished, especially when it comes to art. Defining that for yourself and recognising it for what it is, is important for your own understanding, which helps form your course of action.
Celebrating is part of recognising, but also means taking the time and making the space to move that recognition from the mental to the physical realm. External rewards can be very motivating and can play an important role in the early stages of developing habits. While external motivation has diminishing returns over time and can even be harmful for inner motivation in the long term, it is also a useful way to cement habits into your life. Celebrating can mean a lot of different things.
What it is and how you do it is also up to you to define. Sometimes, the reward and celebration are the undertaking itself, and completing it is enough to drive your inner motivation forward. Take the time to enjoy your completed task, and give yourself a small break before moving onwards.
Developing inner motivation through habits is very important when it comes to improving your ability to finalise your endeavours. An important skill to develop through your new habits is discipline.
- Rely on Discipline, Not Inspiration
Inspiration is fleeting, and it's an ethereal cobweb, easily destroyed and very fragile, but it makes beautiful, silky dreams, which morph and shift in the light into all kinds of wonderful ideas. You can’t force inspiration, and you can’t control it. You can cultivate it and create an environment in which it thrives and lingers, but it can never be tamed. If you only rely on inspiration as aid to finish your designs, then you might be left waiting for a very long time. This is especially bad if you’re prone towards procrastination or you have deadlines to meet. Waiting for the right moment can be in vain, as there isn’t always a right moment.
You shouldn’t focus on the things you can’t change, and it’s best to turn your attention towards the things you can control, not the ones you can’t. While inspiration might be flimsy and uncontrollable, discipline isn’t. Discipline is your very own ability to change your destiny and fate. It’s the little exercise of free will you have in an uncaring world determined by the wills of others. It’s your very own willpower, and it’s incredibly useful when it comes to getting things done.
There are a lot of ways to train your discipline, and we’re not going to cover it now, but one of the most important things is to finish what you start and to do what you say. Discipline is largely about keeping the promises you make with yourself. Hold yourself accountable, practice mindfulness and awareness, and you will be finishing all those unfinished projects in no time.
But don’t be too hard on yourself. Self-discipline isn’t about self-flagellation, and strictness isn’t about punishment and deprivation. Some people struggle with discipline because it involves doing things you might not necessarily want to, but when it comes to art, it’s more about putting yourself out there for inspiration to find you, than to force creativity. Discipline is a very powerful tool, but it requires balancing.
- The Balancing Act: Evolve & Envision
Our final tip is to find the equilibrium between improving and idealising or evolving & envisioning. This one encompasses more than just one simple trick, and it can honestly be a little difficult to grasp fully, but I am certain it will hit home for many of you creative souls. Let’s begin by looking at the two words: evolve & envision.
Evolve relates to improving, but also to change in general. There is an inherent quality to all art, and that is the ability to change and morph; a painting is in part discovered as it is thought out. Art requires some adaptability, and here’s the balancing part of evolving.
You shouldn’t be too rigid; you have to adapt and roll with the punches. If the project wants to go one way, you have to let it evolve, but you can’t let it grow out of control. You have to be clear and concise. You have to define and limit your project, but you have to let it breathe and to be its own thing as well. Balancing this evolution of it is difficult, but oh so necessary. If you don’t, then it might outgrow budgets, time constraints, or even become too ambitious for your skill. You have to know your limits, and you have to know what you want to do.
Completing something becomes much easier when you know what that end looks like. You have to balance that - to let it grow, but also to know when it’s done. Part of that comes from the second word: envision.
Envision here refers to the idea of the project, your vision of it and the more mental aspects of it. This includes the research, development and general planning for any project, and while it forms the physical end result of your project, it’s the skeleton which the project manifests into flesh around. It’s obvious that the balancing act that follows letting a project evolve also revolves around the vision of the project. Just like you have to dial back and limit the scope of the physical limitations of your work, the same applies to the non-physical.
For example, it’s easy to hide behind “research”. The constant need to further develop your script, your essay and so on, is really just a way to procrastinate. The dangerous thing with getting stuck in the trap of planning out your project is that it feels productive. Envisioning what you want to do and how you’re going to do it gives you this false sense of actually making progress and evolving. The balancing act here is to spend enough time thinking about what you want to do without getting lost in those thoughts.
Balancing the way your project evolves and how you envision it can be very tricky, and if we don’t balance these two, then it’s easy to get lost on the way towards the finish line. You have to limit your scope sometimes, and you have to clearly define what that finish line is. Like how I’m deciding at this moment (past moment for you, future reader) that these 5 tips are enough, and that this is the second last essay for a while.
Final Words
Finalising something can be difficult, and hopefully these 5 points can serve as helpful instructions to help you complete your projects, whether they’re artistic in nature or not. Remember, you don’t have to finish it yourself. When appropriate, you can have someone else finish it for you. You are, after all, the person who decides when your project is complete and when it isn’t. You might have to adopt the attitude of the knife and cut the project short, not because of external constraints but because you decide that enough is enough. It’s easy to lull ourselves into a false sense of incompletion and to overwork things. Sometimes it’s better to cut it off and call that completed.
Remember: the more projects you finish, the easier it gets to complete things - this is the strength of using good habits. Don’t rely on external motivation, but find inner motivation and reinforce it through habits. Your habits will define you, and they are shaped by your decisions. Habits are reliable, and you should put your trust in the things that are, and you should focus on what you can control.
Learn to rely on discipline, not inspiration. Inspiration is fleeting, while discipline is in your hands, and while you can cultivate an environment for inspiration to flourish and thrive, you are in direct control of your own willpower and decision-making. All of these need to be balanced, and you have to learn how to find the right middle ground between two opposing sides.
Balance how the project evolves and how you envision it. All projects change and grow; it’s part of the creative process, and you have to be able to adapt with it, but you also have to put up clear borders, and you have to anchor your vision in reality. You have to limit your scope and be able to tell the difference between letting a project grow comfortably and grow out of control.
With these 5 points in mind, I am sure you will complete many of your wonderful projects. Surely this hasn’t all been procrastination hiding as “researching motivation”.
