On Finishing Things: Why the last 20% are the hardest

For me finishing important projects is hard.

To start things off, Taylor Pearson got a really good cooking analogy for not finishing projects 🦃

Even if your Turkey isn't going to come out quite like you hoped, you should at the least make sure it is cooked all the way through. After all, most turkey cooks often find that they are a bit harder on themselves than anyone else is. A mediocre turkey covered in stuffing, dressing and cranberry sauce is still delicious. And, most people are two drinks deep by the time the food is served and won’t notice. So, the worst mistake you can make when cooking a turkey is not taking it out of the oven. Even if it was a little overcooked or under-seasoned or whatever, you should always finish cooking it and take the turkey out of the oven.

Most of us really only have 2-3 big projects per year that move the needle and actually make a difference. And those are the ones for me that are the hardest to finish.

The worst mistake that we make with most projects is that we get about 80% of the way done and realize that it didn’t turn out quite as we hoped. Then, we leave it in the metaphorical oven, an 80% done project with little raw bits in the middle.

Why do we struggle at the finishing line?

If you are anything like me, as a project that means something to us approaches its finishing touches we start to think about what other people will say about our work. You know, that little voice that tells us we are not good enough. Well, this voice is usually screaming in my ear just before I ship, release or publish any important work.

And that's totally okay. It happens to most of us. It's the natural way of our brain to avoid danger and potential social fallout. The only problem is that it confuses our imperfect projects with wild saber tooth tigers chasing us through the savannah. 🦁

A then the second thing that usually happens, is that we learn new things as we work on a longer project. Pretty much everyone I know who has launched a business, released an important feature, or worked on a massive marketing campaign is always kind of unhappy with the finished product. They learned so much working on it that they now see all these things they would do differently if they started again from scratch.

And you know what? That's an unsolvable problem. If we start a project we will inevitably learn something new, but in this moment we must be vigilant and focus on finishing what we started. We can always get to the new thing later (that paragraph is me speaking to myself btw.).

Because as Leonardo da Vinci famously said:

"Projects are never finished, only abandoned"

Why it's so crucial to finish things

Maybe a few of the early parts of the project being completed create some work that could be used somewhere else - an almost done book can be turned into a few blog posts - but the vast majority of the value is realized at the end.

This following paragraph from Sebastian Marshall, is what sparked this article:

Getting 80% of the way done and quitting usually means you did 80% of the work and only got 10-20% of the value.

An "almost done" project is precisely about as valuable as an almost done turkey.

An hour or two of polish and delivery while we got the entire problem space loaded in our head becomes 3-5 hours after we've forgotten it. Even worse, it becomes 20-30 hours if in the meantime we get a key person change on a project or request for a changed scope from a collaborator or client.

It means we don't get the joyful feeling of completion and momentum.

If it was a paid project, it pushes back getting paid, keeps our accounts receivable worse, and screws up our cashflow.

Even if it’s not as much value as we'd hoped when starting the project, it’s still silly not to get across the finish line. The worst thing we can do is get a project to "almost done" and quit.

So let's take that Turkey out of the oven. Letss crawl and drag ourselves over the finish we have to.

Our future selves will be happy we did.