On Finishing Small Things

Most of what I make never gets announced. A weekend script that renames photos by the date they were taken. A piano arrangement I'll never play for anyone. A blog post draft that sits for three months before I either finish it or delete it.

I used to think the unfinished pile was a failure of discipline. Lately I think it's closer to the opposite — it's what happens when you're making things fast enough that most of them don't need to exist past the moment they taught you something.

Not every project needs an audience. Some of them just need to end.

The ones that do get published — an app, a site, a post like this one — are the small fraction that survived their own dress rehearsal. Everything else did its job quietly and got deleted.

So this is the fraction that made it. More soon.