Journal

The Guilt of Unfinished Projects (And Why You Should Question It)

For most of my working life I have run small businesses on my own. That means I have been my own marketing department, my own finance department, and my own research and development department.

Research and development is the part that keeps a business alive. It drives innovation, stops things going stale, keeps creativity moving. And in any R&D department - whether that’s a big tech company or a one-person flower-growing operation in Scotland - the vast majority of what gets started never reaches the end.

That’s not failure. That’s how it works.

The Research and Development Department Nobody Talks About

When I was growing cut flowers and doing wedding floristry, a lot of my time was spent trying things. Buying seeds to see whether they’d grow in my conditions. Testing how long different varieties lasted in the vase. Working out the best way to pack things for posting. Most of those experiments didn’t work out, for one reason or another - too expensive, wrong climate, not what people wanted. So I stopped them.

No guilt. Just information.

Being a solo R&D department means spending a lot of time starting things, only a small fraction of which ever reach the end. That is the creative heart of any business. If you only start things you already know you’ll finish, you’ve cut out most of what keeps work interesting.

Think about any engineer, product designer, or architect you admire. You know they have notebooks full of things that never got built. That’s not a problem - it’s the process. The abandoned ideas are what makes the finished ones better.

Why Makers Feel This Differently

Artists, writers, poets - we generally accept that not everything they begin will be completed. A painter’s studio is full of canvases that were started, reworked, abandoned, painted over. That’s understood as part of how creative people work.

And yet when we’re talking about our own craft projects, the unfinished ones sit in a cupboard quietly generating shame.

Seth Godin wrote a book called The Dip that is, among other things, about when to give up on things. His argument is that abandoning something is much better done early - you try, you push, you find out what you need to know, and then you stop. That’s not weakness. That’s good judgement.

So why do we treat our unfinished knitting as evidence of personal failure?

What Consumer Culture Does to Your Projects

One significant reason your cupboard has so many unfinished things in it is not personal to you at all. It’s systemic.

Every business in our current economic model is built to resell you. Not because the people running them are bad, but because the whole structure requires growth. So they can’t just sell you the cup. They have to sell you another cup, then the cup’s companion, then the limited edition version.

The way this happens is by making you doubt the thing you already have. You buy a knitting pattern, you’re excited, you get the yarn. Three weeks later the same designer releases a new pattern. They photograph it beautifully, everyone’s talking about it, the test knitters are posting pictures. And your current project suddenly feels like last season.

I know people in The Studio who have bought several kits from the same maker, one after another, because each time a new one came out they couldn’t resist. But buying the next one before finishing the first almost guarantees none of them get done.

My approach now - and I know this sounds slightly extreme - is that when I buy something from a maker, I unsubscribe from their mailing list until I’ve finished it. I don’t want the images and the pull of the next thing while I’m still working on what I have. It helps.

The Near-the-End Problem

There’s a particular thing that happens when you’re close to finishing something, and it’s worth knowing about because it catches a lot of people.

As you get near the end of a project, something starts nudging you towards the next one. I’m knitting a cardigan at the moment - I’m on the second sleeve, which means I’m almost there. But what I keep thinking about is the project I’m going to start when this one’s done.

For some people this shows up as the second-sock problem. The first sock, you’re engaged: working out the pattern, solving things, staying curious. The second sock, you’ve already solved all of that. The novelty is gone and the interest goes with it.

If this is you, try starting your socks two at a time. Or try what I’m doing now, which is allowing myself to do swatches and samples for the next project while still working on the current one. It gives me somewhere to put that restlessness while still finishing what I started.

When Something Goes Wrong

Nothing kills a project faster than a mistake.

I know this in my bones. Whether it’s sending an email with the wrong link in it or knitting two left sides of a cardigan - something goes wrong, my energy drops immediately, and the brain starts saying helpful things like well no wonder, look how tired you are.

The problem isn’t the mistake. The problem is what we do next.

If, at the moment something goes wrong with a project, you put it in a bag and put it away - it will not be finished. I can say this with complete confidence. The bag becomes a holding place for failure and it will stay there.

My approach now is to sort the problem out before I put it down. If I’ve knitted two left fronts of a cardigan, I frog all of that yarn before I stop, so that when I come back to the project I’m coming back to something unfinished, not something wrong. The dentist I was talking to last week has a quilt in a bag with a slightly wonky check fabric in it. My advice to her was: make your decision about that fabric now, before you put it away. Either replace it and start fresh, or decide you’re keeping it. But don’t put the decision into the bag along with the quilt.

What to Do With the Properly Abandoned Ones

Some projects genuinely are done. Not paused, not resting - finished with, even though they’re not complete.

Those are the ones that need to leave your space. Not because you’re giving up, but because every time you look at them and feel bad, that feeling is doing damage to your creativity. Guilt and shame have no business being anywhere near your making.

The work those projects represented - the experimentation, the trying, the learning - that wasn’t wasted. You got something from it, even if you’re not sure exactly what. But the physical supplies, the yarn or fabric sitting there: those can go somewhere they’ll be used.

Not all to a charity shop (though good yarn is always welcome). There are online groups where people swap and pass things on. But move them out, regularly, so your cupboard is a place you’re glad to open.

The point of making is not to finish everything. It never was. The point is the engagement, the curiosity, the working things out. Not every project earns its completion, and that’s fine.

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