I have 47 unfinished drafts. 12 abandoned side projects. 8 books with bookmarks halfway through.

This is not my problem alone.

Starting is cheap, finishing is expensive#

The cost of starting is "having an idea" + "typing the first word." The cost of finishing is "eliminating every small problem keeping it from shipping" — and those problems are always more numerous than you predicted.

Structural asymmetry. Starting rides on inspiration. Finishing requires discipline.

Nobody cares about your draft#

I used to think my drafts were "almost there." Then I compared the draft I'd been polishing to what eventually shipped — they weren't meaningfully different. The shipped version had one property the draft didn't: it shipped.

A 70-point finished work is worth ten times a 95-point unfinished one. Not exaggeration. The unfinished one's value to the world is zero¹.

The three steps for finishing#

What I do now:

1. Pick a deadline; tell a friend
2. Delete every "I'll come back to this" placeholder paragraph
3. Ship, and immediately start the next thing

No "one more polish pass" between (3) and the next thing.

The cost of features argues for default-no on adding things. This argues for default-ship on finishing things. Same spirit.

Footnotes#

1. Counter-example: Kafka's unfinished novels reshaped 20th-century literature. But that's the P=0 outlier; you and I are not Kafka. ↩

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