Having to finish a project before starting a new one

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Does anyone else have feelings of having to finish a project before starting a new one?

For example, say you're painting some furniture you also need to clean out your shed, and your yard. All these tasks need to be done by say, 6 weeks time.

The organising websites say to do things one bit at a time and they'll all get done, say do a bit of the painting, pick up the leaves in the yard and do one shelf in the shed. The next day, do a bit more painting, mow part of the lawn and do the next section of the shed.

It makes me feel all funny though to not have finished at least one of the projects. I would much rather do the whole painting job, then move onto the yard, then clean out the shed, one thing at a time. Trouble is though, doing each project separately this way, somehow makes the total time spent on all three projects that much longer and then I get critizised for spending too much time on things. This happens at work too......

Anyone else?

If I did what those organizer people suggest.... I would NEVER get anything done! I definately have to do one task at a time and see it through before moving on!!

Oh heck yeah. I'm so bad at this that I even eat each meal component individually before moving to the next. i.e. ALL the salad, then ALL the chicken. After that, ALL the corn. I'm not so bad as to eat something like "all the mushrooms in the salad, then all the tomatoes in the salad", though. But when I give in and have some Captain Crunch Crunchberries, I eat all the 'plain' ones first and THEN hit the berries. Mmmmmmm, Crunchberries...

Dang it, now I made myself hungry

Why would these "organizing websites" say that? It doesn't make sense. I've heard people say to break it down, so you feel like you've accomplished something. If finishing one thing makes you feel good, that's a motivator and the right way to go.

I'm the opposite. I want to keep it even and eat a little of each, in order. Don't tell -- it's my dirty little secret. Even with M&Ms, I want to keep the balance of colors, right to the end.

Anyway, do whatever works for you.

There are some exceptions (I have ADHD and I need to hop between activities sometimes so that I don't get bored), but Project Management research shows that in general, when you move a person back and forth between different tasks, it is less effective than when you set him to a single task and allow him to work to completion.

Having tasks run in parallel makes sense if you have several different people to do the work, with each focusing on a single activity.

Last edited by Alphabetania on 22 May 2009, 11:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I've left a lot of things unfinished when I lost interest. I'm really lazy.

I'm exactly the same way. I make sure my food proportions are balanced on my plate down to the very last bite...with m&ms, I take them all out of the bag and organize them by color, then eat them accordingly.

There's sometimes more to it than just laziness. I learned that when I started reading up on the neurology of ADHD. Neurotypical people can choose to concentrate. With ADHD people, blood flows away from the frontal lobe of the brain when they have to do something that doesn't interest them. So they become slow and ineffective.

I have this problem and I asked my psychiatrist whether it wasn't possible for me to somehow convince myself that administrative work or filing is very interesting, but he said that the amount of effort it would take to overcome that weakness would be too exhausting and that I should rather concentrate on developing my strengths.

I don't want to accept defeat so easily though, so I have a psychological experiment which I am going to do on myself this weekend to see if I can't start to work around my problem. If it works, it will be a major breakthrough. If not, I will have a major meltdown!

It really depends on the type of work. If I'm on a roll and enjoying a project I find it almost impossible to put it down until I'm done. If it's something tedious I have to take frequent breaks or I get antsy and my brain starts to hurt.

I think I might function that way too. I can't focus if I'm not interested in the subject. I didn't know that was an ADHD trait, I thought it had something to do with AS. I have a huge academic handicap, I can't study effectively never could. So I took your psychiatrists advice long ago and started focusing on what makes me happy instead of the complete agony which was school.

Do you have a link for that? Or a book or a buzz word I can look up?

This is the way I experience it too. If it is something I enjoy, I will usually try to crank right through to complete the project (to the exclusion of anything else). Afterward I can enjoy the completed project and tidy up, then start something new with a clean slate. If it is something I don't enjoy, but is still necessary, I will schedule small bursts of effort, with breaks doing something I enjoy scattered in. It is important that I stick to the schedule, but I don't feel guilty when I'm taking a break, because it is in the Schedule. I am quite the rule follower, even if I make up the rules. I need some sort of structure and have only thrived in environments where the structure made sense to me.

This is more or less the EXACT way that I see things, too. It is so inefficient to multi task projects and it really bothers me when people do that if I have to work with them. My husband and I argue all the time about this because he starts projects and never finishes them all the time. He seems to think that it is somehow my fault that he never finishes any of them, too. I don't really understand that because I finish every project that I start.... with the exception of quilting projects. Those are an artistic endevore and I have to be in the right frame of mind to work on that sort of stuff. Yard work, house work, painting, etc.... I start something and then I finish it in a timely fashion. PERIOD! My husband started working on the windows for the house and left masking tape all over the glass. It has been there all winter and has now been there all spring. We have a half finished privacy fence, half finished trim work, half finished renovation of the "mud room", half finished front door repairs, half finished threshold repairs.... the list goes on. I don't know how to do work like this... by the way.

Neither do I. An unfinished home project just nags at me, a constant reminder I can't avoid. I don't need that kind of guilt.

Oh yeah... I totally used to do this as a kid. My parents though it was quite odd. I used to hate food all mixed up, too, such as in a casserole.

When I went out on my own after graduating college, I was on the phone with my mother one night and I told her about how I had made this delicious one-dish meal and how easy it was to prepare. She about fell out of her chair in laughter and said, "You know that's a casserole, right?"

Boy. I will have to hunt for that again. It was on a Web site and there were several pictures of brain scans. Seemed to be corroborated in other research articles too. I found it shortly before my ADHD was officially diagnosed. Send me a private message so that I can contact you if I find it again.