Incompletionism

Incompletionism (n): The practice of beginning tasks, completing the majority of the work, and leaving a small portion of the work, such as cleanup tasks, undone.

Sometimes it's hard to finish a task. Take our bedroom remodel. It's "done", but it's not. There's one three-foot length of baseboard that I somehow forgot to nail to the wall, and there are a few things that need to go on the wall. I've been calling the project "done" for months now, but it's not.

In the case of the bedroom project, the excuses are easy. There's no sense getting the hammer, nails, and nail set unless I'm also going to hang pictures. But to do that, I'd have to make sure we have enough picture hangers. And then I'd need to make sure that my wife--the one who has a vision for the room--is around so that we can figure out where to hang things. If I wanted to be diligent, I could look at the dependency graph, realize that my first step is making sure we have picture hangers, and just do that. But for some reason, I haven't yet.

Or take doing laundry. Is the laundry done when every load is clean and dry? Clean, dry, and folded? Or clean, dry, folded, put away, and the basket back to serving as a hamper? For me, it's hard to take any answer but the last. I'm actually pretty good about laundry, unless it's getting terribly late. Maybe a better example is washing dishes. I tend to leave those tough-to-wash items for later. And are the dishes really done if the drying rack is full of clean, dry dishes getting dusty?

Incompletionism can creep in at work, too. Software engineers proverbially dislike documentation, so documentation tends to be left incomplete or unpolished. Sometimes, because nobody has asked about a task, it's easy to assume it's unimportant and leave it undone.

The problem with incompletionism, for me, is that it takes away flexibility, which I value highly (*). Knowing that I have a not-quite-done bedroom project and a mostly-done bathroom project makes me reluctant to start a new remodeling project in the basement. Knowing that I have to put away a basket of laundry before getting started on this week's dirty clothes makes me reluctant to get started. Knowing the drying rack is full of dry dishes means I have to work at putting them away before washing more dishes makes any sense at all.

My incomplete projects need to be finished. When I start a new project or task, I need to finish it, including the cleanup. And I also need to show grace to those who aren't as bothered by incompletionism.


(*) My MBTI type ends with "P", which leads to a lot of "J" behaviors to ensure the flexibility that my "P" nature desires. But at the same time, it's probably my "P" nature that leads to incompletionist behavior.