PROJECT: Finishing projects resolution
PROGRESS: Not really started
START POINT: Was supposed to be January 1, 2013
EXPECTED DATE OF COMPLETION: NEVER
STORY: I pretty much failed at my New Year’s Resolution as soon as it was supposed to get off the ground. I wanted to complete one thing every week. Finish reading a book, draw a picture, clean a room, unpack boxes–I wanted one thing to get done every week, and by the end of the first week of January, I hadn’t finished anything. I had just moved in to a new apartment, though, and I had just begun falling for my gentlemanfriend, and I figured I’d had enough distractions to allow myself a one week buy. By the end of the second week of January, I had again completed nothing. I still had unpacked boxes, I’d made no progress in Les Miserables, and the only time I picked up a pencil was for class.
So began the worst semester to date of my college career. I proceeded to turn in virtually all of my German homework late (if I did it at all), turn in the majority of my Life Writing essays late, read exactly one entire play out of eight for Renaissance Drama, complete two out of perhaps ten blogs for Multimedia Composition, and drop my Philosophy course because I was so behind in all of my other classes. I would say never in my life have I been so unfocused on school, but I could argue that my last semester of high school was about as bad–I almost didn’t graduate because of that one.
It does not bode well when you start a year wanting to finish more things and instead spend the first third of the year finishing significantly less than normal. Things I’ve accomplished from start to finish this year:
This painting
It took me about seven hours. Literally nothing else comes to mind.
So that’s around seven-ish hours of clear productivity out of four, going on five months. It’s impressive, really.
Fortunately, not finishing things continued to bother and interest me during this time, so I was able to mine the problem for my academics–now, here we are.
Non Finito Spaghetti 
Our society focuses more on our failure than our accomplishments, but there is more power in positive reinforcement. Instead of what you haven’t done, consider that you have survived another day, with all of the tasks that are required just to make it through. We set our personal goals way higher than we should and then beat ourselves up for not accomplishing all we set out to do. We really are unfair to ourselves.
The deadlines are what keeps me on schedule, I’d never get anything done without it. They often make me work at obscene hours of the morning, but it always gets done. Probably not the healthiest or smartest way to go about it, but it works. If I don’t have a deadline, I have to really be interested and love the project.