How To Finish Things
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Finishing things is hard. As you get closer to the end of a project, everything slows down, tiny things take forever and what started out as an exciting prospect can become a millstone around your neck.
I’ve got a few techniques, rules and beliefs that have helped me finish dozens of ambitious projects over the years. Hopefully this will give you some new tools to get your projects over the line. Out the gate. Off your plate. Into the world.
How To Live Forever
My last album was called “How To Live Forever”.
It started exciting. I wrote and recorded tracks in seven days. I had a natural deadline - I was moving out of my Berlin studio flat to London the next week.
To make the project more manageable, I gave myself two requirements for each song: a drop (a moment of significant musical contrast) and a joke (it had to have some tongue-in-cheek element)
I think that’s the first rule of finishing things - don’t let it balloon out of control by having an over-ambitious scope. It needs to feel small, because it will only get bigger over time.
Rule One of Finishing Things
Start small
Every simple idea hides a world of unexpected complexity. It’s very rare for something to turn out to be easier than you thought it would be!
The plan with my album was to pay an established producer to complete it, so I could learn what I could sound like in more professional hands. I wanted to give myself the ‘artist development’ experience that used to be offered by record labels where up and coming artists would be paired with seasoned professionals to create the best possible recordings. This meant I didn’t need to spend a lot of time on the first stages of production as I knew I’d have help later.
Before I found the producer, I wanted to get some good vocal recordings. I had a vocal coach at the time so we recorded them in his garden shed studio.
I found a producer who had David Bowie as one of his past collaborators, so I had hight hopes. I brought him everything I’d recorded and committed to an eye-wateringly high price. I had just landed a new app development contract so I thought I could cover it. It was incredibly important to me and I’d wanted to do this for years.
I started getting mixes back. I did not like them. Vocals had been tuned to the wrong melody. Cheesy synths had been added. Now that I could hear my vocals sounding ‘correct’, I started to have reservations about the lyrics, song structures and instrumentation. I started talking to a string arranger and another singer, thinking I needed to get new material to bring the recordings together.
Track one, “Get Connected” was the ultimate exercise in restraint for me. A bass line repeats identically, twice, before anything else happens. As the months went by, this repetition became torture, I just wanted to start layering and layering, adding rhythmic subversions, twists and turns, but I kept reminding myself “when you first recorded this, in the moment, it worked. leave it alone!”.
Eventually, after adding a couple of pre-chorus flourishes to the track and beefing up the chorus vocals, I was ready to accept it. We had one track of ten. It was good enough, and we were only getting started.
That’s my second rule:
Rule Two of Finishing Things
Perfectionism is procrastination
There is no such thing as “perfect”. There is only “the best you can reasonably achieve in the given circumstances”.
So I took my own advice and accepted ‘good enough’. Turned out that people really liked that track. After I released the album, my gym got wind of it and would regularly play it over the big sound system, which was incredibly embarrassing.
Anyway, back to the story. While all this was going on, I was having a weird time with my job. They weren’t paying me very reliably and there was an unusual amount of indirection between myself, the agency and the company. One Wednesday morning I came into the office in Piccadilly Circus, the very middle of London, and there was grumbling that the permanent employees hadn’t even been paid. That afternoon, the CEO told us to grab all our stuff and take it out of the office. They hadn’t paid their rent for two months and needed to do a runner. The company went into administration leaving all its employees unpaid. I’d worked a sold two unpaid months, which was supposed to cover my rent and this producer’s costs, and was now gone.
I could have given up right there. I have never lost so much money. I didn’t know if I’d be able to finish the project, now that my need to pay rent made this music project feel very frivolous. I could have made my excuses and given up there and then.
But I didn’t give up, I just slowed down the project to give myself time to find a new contract and build my coffers back up. I got a little less responsive over email, but I didn’t mention anything about the situation to the producer.
Rule Three of Finishing Things
Don’t stop. No excuses.
As you approach the end of a project, the problems get smaller and smaller, but mis-steps can have larger and larger consequences. The way you managed things for most of the project becomes inadequate. Getting a mix and sending back an email with adjustments isn’t enough.
A year or so later, I had final mixes that, if I didn’t over-think it too much, were a fair representation of what I’d originally imagined. It had been an exhausting process. I always try not to be a ‘nightmare client’ because I know what that feels like as a service provider. I kept reminding myself that the experiment was to see what could eventually come out of that original one week recording session. It didn’t need to be anything more.
But that was only the first step. I needed art. I needed marketing. I needed everything it takes to release an album.
I’d been trying to commission an artist to do this, who’d been the inspiration behind another project and had told me he loved the album when I sent him the demos. But as the months went on, I had to accept that it was not a priority for him and that I needed to produce something myself.
Finishing the album meant going into the studio and sitting next to the producer. We spent a couple of days just making finishing touches.
The more granular you get with changes like this, the more perspective you lose - the more little problems you notice. It becomes a process of knowing when to ignore yourself, to override your instincts, to force yourself to stop.
If you don’t stop, you risk “over-producing” the song. You start to remove its humanity. The result is a bland recording that contains no flaws, which means that it contains no vulnerability - no points of humanity over which your audience could connect.
Everything can feel like a mistake at that scale and you have to change your criteria from “how shall I fix this problem?” to “is this really a problem?”.
You have to finish the thing without ruining it in the process.
Eventually your checklist will get shorter faster than it grows and you’ll almost be at the finish line.
You’ve nearly completed step four.
Rule Four of Finishing Things
Finish. The. Thing.
Now you have to deal with a huge emotional barrier.
Most people will never get past this one.
Completing a project is difficult because you have to embrace death.
Not literally (usually) but the death of possibility.
Before a thing is finished, it could still be anything. It could still be every earnest or whimsical thing you wish it to be. It could have any artwork, any name, any structure, any number of components, any number of collaborators and any number of forms.
While you are working on a project, its potential is infinite.
When you finish a project, it becomes one thing. In the moment you decide that it is finished, each aspect of its infinite potential dies.
How do you know you’re finished? You know you’re finished when you start to mourn the loss of what the thing could have been.
You know you’re finished when you cry.
The longer it’s been hanging over you, the more you cry.
The only way to take the edge off is to remember that this is not the last thing you’ll ever make. And now you can pick up your next project without guilt, knowing that the last one is done.
Well, I you still have to show it to people and face the soul crushing void of public apathy, but that’s a story for another time.
I knew I’d finished How To Live Forever when I finished the artwork. I’d tried dozens of ideas and techniques before landing on the final concept. It was a little awkward but I got it looking, to me, ‘good enough’. I said to myself “that’s good enough” and then I cried because it was done.
I always say to people “there is no better feeling in this world than finishing something”.
In the moment, those tears are incredibly cathartic.
And then you feel a weight lift from your shoulders. You find yourself walking upright again, instead of stooped under the weight of failure and self-doubt.
You have made something. It now exists in the world. It didn’t exist before but you made it and now it does.
You want people to like it, to love it, to love you because of it, but that’s not the reason to finish it.
You finish it so you can move forwards to the next thing, and then next thing, and beyond.
Rule Five of Finishing Things
Embrace death
So that’s my five rules for finishing things.
Five rules:
- Start small.
- Perfectionism is procrastination.
- Don’t stop. No excuses.
- Finish the thing.
- Embrace death