Finishing is a separate skill

I have a drawer of beginnings. Half a board game, three chapters of a story, a typeface with only lowercase letters. For a long time I thought the drawer was a sign of creativity. Now I think it is a sign that I never practised the second half of making things.

Starting uses curiosity, which is free and renews itself. Finishing uses something else: patience with the boring middle, and the nerve to call a thing done while you can still see its flaws.

The last ten percent is a different job

The end of a project is mostly small, unglamorous work. Exporting files. Fixing the alignment on page twelve. Writing the short note that goes with it. None of it feels like making, so it is easy to drift to a new, shinier start.

Done is a decision, not a feeling. The feeling arrives a week later, if at all.

What helped me was treating finishing as its own project with its own list. When a thing is about ninety percent there, I stop adding and write down every remaining task, however tiny. Then I only work from that list.

Three rules from the drawer

• No new ideas get added once the finishing list exists. They go in a notebook for the next thing.

• Every project gets an audience of one, even a friend, so that done means someone saw it.

• If a project has sat untouched for two months, I either finish it this week or put it in the drawer on purpose, with a note saying why.

The third rule matters more than it looks. Deciding to stop is also a way of finishing. The drawer is fine; pretending you'll get back to everything in it is what weighs on you.

If you're wondering where the time for this comes from, the ninety-minute evening is my answer for weeknights.

The audience of one changed more than I expected. When a friend knows the date I promised to send her something, the boring middle gets easier. Nobody wants to explain that the board game is still missing its rules page for a fourth week in a row.

I also learned to lower the bar for what counts as finished. A zine can ship with one typo. A song can be recorded on a phone. A drawing can be scanned crooked. The version that exists teaches you more than the perfect version in your head, and it is the only one anyone else can enjoy.

Finishing also needs an ending ritual. Mine is small: I write a three-line note about what went well, what I'd change and what I learned, then I put the files in a folder called "done" with the date. It sounds silly. It is the moment my brain finally lets go of the thing and makes room for the next one.

And when a project ends, I take one evening off before starting anything new. The gap keeps the next project from being a reaction to the last one.

This week's question: what is the oldest unfinished thing you still think about? Hit reply. I'll share a few answers, without names, next month.

— Ines