I have a folder on my hard drive called "in progress" that contains forty-three items.
Some have been "in progress" since 2019, which is a very generous description of their status. There's an essay I started on a flight to Bangkok that has a great opening paragraph and absolutely no idea where it's going. A short story that got to page six and stopped, mid-sentence, as if I simply vanished from reality while writing it. A series of photographs from one rainy week that I was going to "sequence into something." A playlist for a creative project that no longer exists. A half-designed... thing. I cannot remember what it was supposed to be.
For years, this folder made me feel like a creative disaster. Evidence of forty-three abandonments. Forty-three projects that whispered *you started us, you never finished, what does that say about you?* every time I accidentally opened the folder. It said: you are a person who starts things and doesn't finish them, which is basically the creative equivalent of being the friend who always suggests plans and then cancels.
Then, about a year ago, I stopped finishing things on purpose. As a policy decision. And everything weirdly got better.
Here's what happened: I'd reached a point where I wasn't starting anything new because the pressure to finish was so paralysing. Every new idea came with an invisible contract attached: *if you start this, you WILL see it through. You WILL produce something complete. You will NOT add to the graveyard folder.* And because I couldn't guarantee that, I just... didn't start anything. For months.
So in a moment of desperation I wrote a note and stuck it above my desk: *You are allowed to start things you don't finish. The starting is enough.*
Within two weeks I'd started six new things. SIX. After months of nothing.
This sounds like a psychological trick, and it is — but it works for a real reason. The reason is: finishing is not why we start things. We start things because something caught our attention. A curiosity, a question, a feeling worth following. The starting is where the energy lives. The development and completion — that's valuable, but it's downstream of the spark. And when the pressure to finish gets welded onto the spark, the spark goes out. The curiosity becomes a commitment. The joy becomes a job. And you stop lighting matches altogether.
Since I gave myself permission to not-finish, I've started more things than I have in years. I've also — and here's the twist — finished more things. Because when finishing is optional, you only finish the ones that are genuinely worth finishing. The ones that are still alive after six weeks. The ones that grew from real curiosity rather than obligation. Turns out, those are much easier to complete.
The forty-three items aren't reproaching me anymore. They're a record of curiosity. Forty-three encounters with ideas that interested me enough to follow for a while. Some I'll come back to. Some taught me everything they had to teach in two pages. Some were secretly scaffolding for something else I didn't know I was building yet.
I'm not dismissing the skill of finishing — finishing is genuinely hard and requires its own discipline. But finishing-as-obligation murders starting, and starting is where everything alive comes from. You can't finish things you never begin. And you'll never begin things if every beginning comes with a blood oath to complete them.
One rule for the folder now: no guilt allowed. Curiosity is allowed. I can wonder what I was thinking when I started something. I can wonder if it still wants to become something. I can notice that three of these unfinished things are secretly the same idea wearing different hats.
But guilt? Guilt is banned. Guilt is the opposite of creativity and they cannot be in the same room.
The forty-three items. The Edinburgh essay. The mysterious photographs. The six-page story that stops mid-sentence.
They're not evidence of failure.
They're evidence of a person who starts things. Which is, honestly, a much better problem to have than being a person who doesn't.