Think of all those books you couldn’t wait to read, but never actually finished; the projects you giddily started that petered to stagnation; the ideas that never moved into actual conception. Not everything is meant to be finished, but many of us have a boatload of projects, books, emails, and to-dos that have been relegated to a kind of purgatory of incompletion.
Why does this happen? Nearly a quarter of adults around the world are chronic procrastinators, according to research conducted by Joseph Ferrari, professor of psychology at DePaul University and author of the book Still Procrastinating: The No Regrets Guide to Getting It Done. The result: When you’re working on something without a clear deadline, seeing it through to its end can be a huge challenge.
But when it comes specifically to the matter of finishing what we’ve started, why do we often hit a block? “For chronic procrastination, this is not an issue of time management. You can’t manage time. You manage yourself,” says Ferrari. To better manage yourself, you need to know why it is you’re not completing what you’ve started in the first place.
Why you can’t finish anything
Some of the reasons you’re not completing that one big project—even though it’s so important to you—could be:
1. Perfectionism
One of the reasons people don’t finish tasks is their fear of being evaluated. “People don’t want to have their ability judged, they’d rather have their effort judged,” says Ferrari. Prolonging—or never finishing—a task or project could be one way of avoiding that fear of being harshly evaluated. If you end up rushing to complete a project—whether or not there’s a deadline—the results may not be great, but you can tell yourself that it’s because you rushed. Or this fear can paralyze you and you never finish at all.
If this sounds like you–that, in your effort to really give the most important work your all, you end up feeling like you constantly blow it–you’re likely struggling with perfectionism and it’s holding you back from finishing that passion project.
2. Fear of setting the bar too high
Sometimes it’s not failure, but success that makes people clam up and avoid completing a task or project. This goes back to accountability, says Ferrari. Do too good of a job the first time around and you might be setting yourself up with impossible standards for the future. What if you can’t live up to that success?
3. You’re waiting for “perfect.”
Perhaps you’re so excited and passionate about it that you avoid it for weeks because you really want to wait until “just the right time” when you can focus on it for hours without interruption, when you’ve cleared all the little things off your task list, and your workspace is perfectly in order. But often, the ideal time never arrives.
It’s not that procrastinators are lazy. More likely they are busying themselves doing things other than what they are supposed to be doing. Claiming you work best under pressure–another of the procrastinator’s favorite go-tos–is simply not true, says Ferrari. When put under time restraints to complete a task, he found that subjects claiming to work better under pressure actually produced worse results.
4. Life gets in the way.
When we lose, we lose by degrees. We get sidetracked by one thing and then another, and before we know it, we’re way off course. Big projects have a way of hiding behind the daily nagging of life. You might begin a project with excitement and fast progress, but as more immediate tasks demand attention, it gets buried.
How to finish what you start
Whether or not you know why you’re failing to finish, here are some tips on how to finally get things done:
1. Stop ruminating over the negatives.
Ferrari once worked with a graduate student who claimed creative people aren’t procrastinating so much as taking needed time to complete creative work. “Like yeast, we need time to rise,” said his student. Fair enough. But when embarking on creative work, what are you thinking about when you take the time to focus? Are you ruminating about failures or savoring the good times? “What we found was that they were ruminating about failures,” says Ferrari of his examination of procrastination patterns in creative people. That negativity was what hurt their progress most.
2. Break it down.
Procrastinators who avoid finishing what they’ve started don’t miss the forest for the trees, as the euphemism goes–they miss the trees for the forest. “People who have trouble finishing a project don’t have problems seeing the big picture,” says Ferrari. “It’s how to break it down into manageable tasks that can be paralyzing.”
But knowing the issue can be the first step toward solving it. So separate that huge project into smaller tasks, and if those tasks still seem too daunting, break them down even further.
3. Plan intermediate deadlines and hold yourself to them.
Now that you have the pieces of your project, it’s time to schedule them out. Especially if you struggle with perfectionist tendencies, once you get started into a project, you’ll need to have a plan for how to stop yourself from investing too much time on individual parts of the work.
A common area where this flares up is research. If you’re struggling with perfectionism, you’ll tend to over-research topics because you don’t want the possibility of someone bringing up something that you didn’t know. You’ll also tend to struggle to get out of the research phase because it feels safer to read what other people have done than to put your own thoughts and ideas out there.
If this sounds like you, predetermine how much time is an acceptable amount to put into a particular part of research: Maybe it’s one hour, three hours, or five hours. Then stick with that. Once you have put in the time, stop and pivot to the next stage.
Then, do the same thing for each step of your project. If your project is larger in scale, the amount of time of a step may be measured in days, weeks or even months, but the concept is the same. The key to success is to give yourself a time limit, do the work, and then move on to the next part. Get the work to an acceptable level in each area with the understanding that you can come back and refine later. This leads to an overall better outcome than fixating on making a particular part of a project perfect before you move on.
This doesn’t mean everything will always go according to schedule—there may be times where you need to spend some extra time to get something done. But if you’re going long past beyond what you had determined was the appropriate amount of time, then you likely need to stop yourself and move on.
4. Keep your project front and center.
No, not in a “vision board” type of way. Visualizing information is proven to make a message faster to absorb than text, and easier to remember.
Putting your passion projects in front of your own face every day keeps them from slipping into the daily grind. If you’re working on saving enough for a dream vacation–and resisting buying lunch out every day–tape a beach photo to your cubicle wall.
If you’re having trouble staying on task, type and print your on a scrap of paper, and frame it for your desk. It’s the reverse of the old adage, “out of sight, out of mind.”
5. Be aware of what might slow you down—especially near the end.
To avoid getting blindsided and knocked off course, spend time at the beginning thinking about what might prevent you from completing your project. What obstacles could suddenly land in your way? Where is the project weakest? What milestone, if missed, could derail everything else? These sound like big-project issues, but they’re just as common for small projects. Stay on high alert until the finish line is actually behind you, and no sooner.
There are two points in every project when you should budget more time than you think you’ll need: the beginning and the end. Those are the most common dropout periods.
Why? Because in the beginning, you often don’t make progress as quickly as you’d like, or it turns out to be harder or more complicated than you first expected. You feel like you aren’t getting a return on your investment. You lose interest. You abandon the project.
Maybe you’ve gotten past those hurdles and can see the end in sight. But by that point, you’re exhausted. You can’t believe you haven’t finished yet. You’re worried about devoting more time and resources than you’ve already invested. Sometimes, precisely because of all the progress you’ve made, other opportunities crop up and distract you.
How do you get past these weak spots? Plan to overdo it right from the start. Commit before setting out to get through the first 15% and the last 15% of the project. Whatever you think it will take in terms of time and resources, double or triple it. The best-case scenario is that you’ll make progress faster—maybe even by a giant leap. The important thing is to build and maintain the momentum that will carry you over the bumps in the road, past the exhaustion and distractions that threaten to derail you.
Anything you can put off in order to focus on finishing, do so. Give yourself no excuses not to devote all the time, energy, thought, and resources you’ll need to getting things wrapped up. As soon as you do, you can turn your attention to the next thing. Clutter is the enemy of completion.
Remember: “almost finished” gets you almost nothing.
6. Be ruthlessly committed.
Robin Sharma, leadership consultant and author, calls this the “90-90-1 Rule.” It goes like this:
“For the next 90 days, devote the first 90 minutes of your work day to the one best opportunity in your life. Nothing else. Zero distractions. Just get that project done. Period.”
That sounds nice, but we don’t live in an ideal world. Employing the 90-90-1 Rule means saying no to all of the things that vie for your most precious hours. But it’s uncomfortable, initially, to deny all of the pinging, alert-pushing, “urgent” marked messages that hit us first thing in the morning.
But even if you can’t fully put off these things, be a little selfish with your time, whether it means getting up 90 minutes earlier in the morning or spending 90 in the evening quiet. If you don’t look out for your own passion projects’ health and progress, no one else will.
7. Focus on the work, not the feedback.
Once you get into producing work, you may find yourself getting stressed and overthinking things because you’re wondering how others will respond to what you present. This can lead to analysis paralysis, where you invest much more time in thinking than doing.
To avoid this trap of perfectionism, integrate constructive feedback on how you could improve, but then try to block out thoughts of the future about how people will or won’t respond. Vague concern about whether people will think you’re amazing doesn’t do anything to help you actually get the work done.
When those invasive thoughts slow you down, shut them out with this truth: I can’t control how people do or don’t respond to me. All I can control is what I do now.
A growth mindset is healthy; recognize that you can always develop and improve over time. You don’t need to get everything right all at once.
8. Start today.
If you struggle with perfectionism, then planning to do something “later” can easily slide into procrastination, because you aren’t willing to start until you reach some optimal state of professional nirvana that never comes.
If you’re falling into that trap, start whatever you’re avoiding today. Or, if that’s truly not possible, put it in your calendar for some time in the next week and then begin the project when that time comes.
The timing might not be ideal: You might be a little distracted, only have one hour instead of the two you planned, or there still might be some stray miscellaneous items on your desk that now seem intensely fascinating even though you’ve ignored them for weeks. But it’s still better to awkwardly get going than to delay.
The law of inertia tells us a body in motion stays in motion. And the same goes for projects, creative ideas, daily tasks, half-written emails, and that thing you stopped working on to read this article. When you interrupt a task, it can be difficult to pick it up again.
You may feel like your book-in-progress, coding class, or painting project is important. It’s close to your heart, you’d be sad if it disappeared from your life, so naturally, it must mean a lot.
But if drafts are gathering dust while daily life pushes it further out of touch, it’s time for some tough love. “I don’t have time to finish my website,” becomes, “Creating my own website isn’t a priority.” If that doesn’t settle well with you, adjust the priority you give your projects.
Ferrari’s advice? “Just do something now. Start something and get going.”
LARRY WEIDEL, ELIZABETH GRACE SAUNDERS, and SAMANTHA COLE also contributed writing, reporting, and/or advice to this article and/or a previous version.
