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Comment by theunixbeard | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else not have a problem with procrastination but instead following through and finishing projects ? Like you get 80-90% of the way there but for whatever reason drop off before completing the job?

This seems like the worst problem because you do 80-90% of the work with 0% of the benefit of accomplishing what you set out to do...

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Yes, but I attribute this to my unconscious mind simply using the projects to learn things. Once I get 80-90% done, over the big hurdles, my unconscious is satisfied and no longer has a desire to complete the project.

This. As long as there are still "unknowns", or things that I still need to learn/figure out, I'm good to go. But once I hit that 90-95% mark where the problems are solved and it's just grunt work, I bail out. My last project I was able to overcome this, so hoping it becomes the new norm for me.

Even though finishing/launching a project is a skill in itself, which I should learn, I fall in to this trap also.

Yeah, I'm in that boat for sure. I tend to have dozens of partially completed projects around at any given time. The best thing I've done so far to make some headway on this problem is to stop thinking of things in terms of being "done" but rather think in terms of "I'm going to spend X hours on this today, regardless of how much I get done." At least for me, deciding to just make steady progress instead of trying to finish seems to mostly eliminate the hang-up. If I focus on the process, things get done. If I focus on the goal, things fall apart.

Yes, and I agree with the rest: once the big challenges are solved and all that is left to do is just chores, I get bored to death.

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