Beyond procrastination: the cognitive reasons behind unfinished projects
From impostor syndrome to cognitive overload — mastering the invisible forces that prevent project success
Remember this sensation: in your mind, a new brilliant project idea sparks, you’re burning with excitement and 200% engaged into work, until… another project/framework/technology beckons. And I totally get it — it’s always greener on the other side. Notebooks are filled with half-finished concepts, Github repos multiply with ambitious beginnings that won’t ever reach their final stage. What starts as passionate creativity often transforms into a stockpile of unfinished potential, an accumulation of partially constructed projects. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not just you. In fact, it’s quite common.
Our relationship with incomplete work is far more nuanced than simple procrastination. It’s a complex relationship of creativity, neurological reward systems, and the profound psychology of potential. When we understand how it works, we can transform seemingly scattered efforts into a powerful attribute of self-improvement.
Look at this from a different angle: those aren’t graveyards of failed projects, but the living laboratories. Each unfinished activity represents a moment of intellectual curiosity frozen in time. Curious? Great! Let’s dive into the complex psychological and neurological mechanisms driving technological exploration.
Short track:
Jump right to this chapter — “Strategies for Meaningful Project Development“.
The Neurological Roots of Project Incompletion
To try and reveal the roots of the new-projects-problem, we’ll explore some ideas, backed up by psychological and neuroscientific works.
Dopamine-Driven Novelty Seeking: The Neural Reward Circuitry
Our brain is evolutionarily wired to seek novelty as a survival mechanism. Dr. Andrew Huberman explains in his neuroscience study that this novelty-seeking behavior stems from our brain’s dopamine reward system, which creates a powerful neurochemical response to new experiences.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter. It is involved in many brain functions and well-known for its role in movement, motivation, and addiction.
Each new technological discovery triggers a dopamine release, creating a neurochemical reward that far exceeds the more mundane satisfaction of completing existing work. Our neural circuits are designed to anticipate and seek out potential rewards, constantly pushing us towards new and exciting possibilities.
Naturally chasing neural circuits satisfaction, we tend to:
- alternate projects/technologies/frameworks/etc, driven by the brain’s reward prediction mechanism
- pursue bleeding-edge and freshly emerging libraries and languages
- start greenfield projects instead of maintaining existing repos
- immediately hop on to the new technique after a workshop/conference/article
This naturally applies beyond the hobby or side projects. Remember when half-way through refactoring of some legacy codebase you discover a new tech that supposedly speeds up your work and potentially grants your project 50% performance kick?
In his book, “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain”, Dr. David Eagleman describes a neural plasticity effect of activation of our brain’s novelty circuits. From developer’s perspective the new technology seems then more exciting and potentially more valuable than the current mundane work.
Complexity Overwhelm and Cognitive Load
While novelty seeking tends to propagate positive experiences, their amount can become a challenge. Especially when work is paralleled and/or task-switching engaged. Our brain has limited working memory capacity, a concept extensively explored quite a while ago by John Sweller in his Cognitive Load Theory. Relatively recent famous work by Dr. Daniel Kahneman — “Thinking, Fast and Slow” — further elaborates on how our cognitive resources become depleted when faced with complex problem-solving tasks.
For developers, this can be simply demonstrated as a progressive mental exhaustion. The brain’s working memory acts like a small workspace that becomes quickly overwhelmed by intricate technical challenges. As project complexity increases, cognitive load creates a psychological defense mechanism of avoidance and task-switching. And, unfortunately, we’ve often been there:
- initial excitement is replaced with cognitive exhaustion
- some complex architectural decisions become paralyzing
- technical debt creates increasing mental friction
- project scope tends to become overestimated
The prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive function, becomes progressively taxed. Stress and complexity directly impact our brain’s ability to maintain focus and execute complex tasks. While some of these statements look obvious, there are probably even more deeply rooted brain mechanisms worth exploring. We’ll touch them in the next section.
Fear-Based Project Avoidance and Psychological Barriers
Fear is a primal emotion that shapes our most intimate professional decisions. Applied to our realm, fear transforms from a basic survival mechanism into a psychological barrier that can paralyze even the most talented developers. Here are just a couple of the most common patterns that we can experience.
Perfectionism Paralysis
Dr. Pauline Rose Clance’s groundbreaking research on the Impostor Phenomenon provides insight into this challenge. The fear of imperfect implementation stems from a deep-seated psychological mechanism where developers:
- doubt their technical capabilities
- engage in constant reevaluation or refactoring without meaningful progress
- compare potential output to an idealized mental model
Impostor Syndrome
Going further with the impostor syndrome, Mike Cannon-Brookes, in his influential TED Talk, describes it as a universal experience among high-achieving professionals. Often met between writers, artists, various creators, and of course developers this results in:
- persistent doubt about technical abilities
- fear of external judgment and following blockers
- preventing project completion to avoid potential criticism
Technology Obsolescence Anxiety
Dr. Cal Newport’s work on deep work and technological anxiety suggests that this fear is rooted in our rapidly changing technological landscape. Cobol, Perl and to the very recent time React.js developers are probably on the safe side in this regard. Nevertheless, jokes (?) aside, some of you can remember:
- constant worry about implementation becoming outdated
- perpetual desire to incorporate latest best practices
- endless loop of “one more optimization”
The Incompleteness Addiction
The quagmire of perpetual technological improvements goes arm-in-arm with another concept, hinted on previously. Unfinished projects represent infinite potential. Completion on the other hand means confronting actual versus imagined capabilities, which can be psychologically threatening.
James Clear touches that aspect of human behaviour in the popular book “Atomic Habits”. He explores how our brains are wired to find comfort in potential rather than finality. This mechanism protects the developer’s self-image by maintaining the project in a state of perpetual promise, avoiding the potential disappointment of real-world constraints and limitations.
If you find yourself in the place of endless proof-of-concept development or… exploring theories over practical implementations or… initializing multiple project versions without finalization you definitely know what’s this is about. These neurological and psychological mechanisms aren’t weaknesses but sophisticated cognitive strategies.
And you know what else? You are not alone struggling with fear of accomplishment, collecting numerous incomplete projects or hopping styles, genres and technologies. You are, in fact, in a legendary company.
Great Minds and Unfinished Symphonies
Consider Leonardo da Vinci, whose notebooks were living documents of boundless intellectual exploration. He is known primarily as painter; but as a draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect he recorded 13000 pages of studies. Needless to say, majority of those works was unfinished. His approach reveals a critical insight: transformative developers are not those who persistently complete every project, but those who remain curious and adaptable.
Franz Kafka was the writer and an existential experimenter. Kafka didn’t write stories — he conducted psychological experiments. His fragmented manuscripts weren’t incomplete — they were deliberate explorations of human uncertainty. The “Dante” and one of the greatest writers of the 20th century finished none of his full-length novels and burned around 90 percent of his work, leaving his dear friend Max Brod thousands of drafts after his death…
If you aren’t familiar with Sir Alfred Hitchcock — the film director and the technological innovator, you would certainly recognize his movie by the iconic scene.
For Hitchcock, each film was an experimental ground. He didn’t just create movies; he continuously reimagined the language and shape of modern cinema as we know it. And this next quote is particularly curious, I’m sure it resonates in some of you:
“Once the screenplay is finished, I’d just as soon not make the film at all. All the fun is over. <…> When you finish the script, the film is perfect. But in shooting it you lose perhaps 40 per cent of your original conception.”
For Frida Kahlo, the personal technologist, art was a constant negotiation between personal narrative and technical exploration. She is famous for autobiographical paintings, where each painting was a technological and emotional experiment. Kahlo’s work has been celebrated internationally as emblematic of Mexican national and Indigenous traditions and by feminists for what is seen as its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form.
In every creative domain, in every country there are famous figures, known for their works and, incidentally, working methodology. We only met a fracture of a percent of them in this article and I invite you to study more for the unbelievable insights.
While dopamine-driven novelty seeking and cognitive challenges are not obstacles, but intricate neural mechanisms that have driven human innovation, what if they really pose a problem of self-rumination cycles and blocking you from progression to the next level? We’ll now explore several critical strategies that can help you to channel your creative energy into meaningful outcomes.
Strategies for Meaningful Project Development
Progressive Rendering
Inspired by artistic techniques and incorporated in JPEG technology, progressive rendering is a methodological approach to project development that prioritizes incremental progress over perfection from the get go.
Consider the two practical phases — sketch and layering.
In the sketch phase you create the most viable version of the project, focusing on the core functionality and basic structure. You simply don’t need anything else beyond fundamental architecture and primary usability. If it’s a UI library, forget rounding and line height alignment — focus on API, build process and delivery. If it’s a landing page, don’t mind the parallax effect and concentrate your efforts on the scalable accessible mobile-first layout.
In the layering phase you progressively (layer by layer, iteration by iteration) add complexity and refinement, implementing features in order of priority and impact. At the end of each iteration you need to validate it against the final project vision to understand the scope of the next layer. This stage is crucial, as taking a larger scope into the next iteration (adding several features or underestimated chunk of work) can result in unexpected blockers following by scattered effort, losing focus, momentum, flow and satisfaction from the previously completed steps.
The benefits of this technique are tremendous:
- it reduces cognitive overload
- it provides early validation of the core concept
- it creates tangible progress that motivates toward further development
- it allows for flexible adaptation as project understanding hardens
I foresee the silent question — “did you just reinvent Scrum?! interrobang, interrobang”. Well, fair enough, it’s one of the key aspects.
However, in practice working by Scrum doesn’t always mean actually understanding it. Let alone personal projects management when you are working alone constantly changing hats of angel ventures, stakeholders, product owners, scrum masters AND developers. But if you master or at least exercise that, your personal workflow improvements will be mirrored and rewarded as you grow professionally.
Intentional Pruning
Continuing with the efficient practices for project management, intentional pruning is a disciplined approach that involves deliberately limiting project scope to ensure meaningful completion. In simple terms…
Cut down everything enticing and shiny in favor of functional and achievable!
In order to apply this practice, stick to the following:
- evaluate features based on the core objectives
- prioritize functionalities with the highest user value
- ruthlessly eliminate nice-to-have-s
The latter is probably the hardest, at least from a personal experience…
However, once you push through this once or twice (practice makes perfect!), you’ll see immense benefit. Not only you will be able to finish current projects, but your planning and architecture skills will be honed again and again, creating a great working habit. Eventually, feature elimination will be recognized as strategic optimization, not failure.
Sometimes you need to let go to see the wood for the trees.
Graceful Project Closure
Like not every story ends happily ever after, not every project is meant to reach full completion, and acknowledging this is a mark of personal and professional maturity. This is essentially letting go on a BIGGER scale.
To employ this practice you should most probably find yourself in a place of supporting multiple projects in parallel and finding hard time to either complete them or switch to the new ones.
Tempered by the feature-culling experience you should be prepared to take the next steps:
- be honest with yourself, and conduct an objective project assessment
- identify and extract the learning opportunities from unfinished work
- document findings and salvage resources for the future applications
In order to drop the guilt and transform disappointment intro strategic insight, you will need to separate personal worth from project outcomes and view unfinished work as learning experience. Each proper project closure will be identified as another instrument in a toolbox of a professional, who values exploration and iteration.
In Conclusion
Having multiple unfinished projects is way more nuanced than simple procrastination. It often seems as a professional shortcoming and understandably is self-joked upon. But as we’ve explored together this is both personal challenge and a fundamental aspect of human creative cognition.
This sometimes poses a real issue for developers and creative minds, leading to professional stagnation, reduced productivity and personal frustration. However, by understanding the underlying psychological and neurological mechanisms, we can transform this pattern from a potential limitation into a strategic instrument of self development.
Engage careful analysis, self-awareness and several targeted techniques, and it will help you to channel your creative impulses more effectively, balancing with meaningful execution. The goal is not about a perfect completion, but meaningful progress. Stay curious and systematic and you will succeed!
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