Unfinished Projects

Today I took a look at my old Github repos.
I was surprised about the number of abandoned projects. I deleted them all, and the total was 23 projects for the past 2 years!
that made me think for a bit about why I don't finish what I start. I was excited about it the day I started it, so What happened?

I said yes to projects that are not worth it

a lot of the projects were not even worth the time and effort to put into them.
Yes, I would learn something from them but it has low ROI.

I had a lot of choices

I had at least 3-5 projects open almost all the time.
I'm not good at multitasking, I love focusing on one thing and getting it done! Having a lot of choices make me not choose any of them, or jump from one to one and not get anywhere with any of them!

Unlimited time

I noticed that almost all the finished projects that I completed had a deadline!

I'm not a big fan of the idea of having deadlines, so I always praise myself that I'm free to finish this whenever I want, but today the data showed me that this freedom actually leads to not finishing the project at all!

a part of my mind still resists restricting myself with deadlines even when I'm writing this.

Solution

this is a list of solutions I thought about right now and I will put them to work with the next projects: (I'll update this post after a while to give feedback)

1 - Hell Yeah! or No

a great idea from my friend Darek sivers https://sive.rs/n If I'm not feeling hell yeah that would be awesome then don't do it! also, try to calculate the ROI (Return on investment) to see if it's worth it.

Most of the projects you come up with are worthless (more than 90%)

and it's okay to leave the idea until later.

2 - Set a short limited time

set limited time (ideally less than 48 hours) to get the project done or at least get a small working MVP to show.
this would prevent me from seeking perfection and focusing on getting it to work.
it is easier to fix ( or even recreate ) something than to create it from scratch.

3 - have a closer mindset

a concept by Casey Neistat which is:
someone who starts something and never finishes it, That is a LOSER
someone who starts something and always finishes it, That is a CLOSER

So adopt a mindset that it is not okay to start something and not finish it!
you'll feel good after finishing it anyway, even if it was not perfect, that would set you up to finish more stuff in the future, in a better way.

Yay, I finished this post!