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"Finish It" February

I'll admit it: I am a chronic Starter of Things. Blame it on my corporate zodiac. I have lists of unfinished media and projects both a mile long. There's a rush I get from starting something new, but once that feeling is gone, I often find myself seeking new experiences and feelings instead of putting in the time and effort to see a conclusion to the old. And that's a shame, because finishing a great story or putting the final touches on a creative endeavour are incredibly rewarding. If only my monkey brain were so easy to tame...

As I reflected on this the other night, an idea struck me for this upcoming month. What if I made an effort to start nothing new? What if I dedicated February to cleaning up that gargantuan WIP list, at least a little? So I came up with a cute alliterative title for my self-imposed challenge: "Finish It" February!

For the month of February, I am going to focus on finishing games, books, webpages, and more that have been sitting unfinished for months, or in some embarrassing cases, years. All of it is stuff I genuinely enjoy, or I would have formally dropped it instead of letting it hang in limbo. I'm just too quick to shift my attention to something else when I hit a slow part in a story or a tedious stage of a project. Perhaps this is another one of those ways in which a decade of heavy Twitter use fried my brain. (I really want to read How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell to further interrogate and perhaps repair my ailing attention span...AFTER I finish my current reading list, that is. 😉)

Here are my main targets for stuff I want to finish — most of which aren't even that long or have that much progress to go. Again, monkey brain.

We'll see how well I do! Please cheer me on as I attempt to wrap up these loose ends. I hope that this exercise will train me to see things through more as I achieve that satisfying feeling of marking things "complete" all month long. I'll check back in at the end of the month to hold myself accountable!

UPDATE: Overall, I did decently well with this challenge! I didn't finish everything on my list (it was a bit ambitious for one month, in retrospect) but I did manage to complete some things that had been hanging around in my backlog for a long time. I also decided to drop Trigun '98. I feel bad about it, knowing how beloved the series is—but it simply wasn't grabbing me, and life is short.

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