I want to talk about something I’ve been noticing quite a bit recently in conversations with others, and that’s what I’ve started calling the 80% problem.
Here’s what it looks like in practice. You start a project. You’re energised, the ideas are flowing, you’re making real progress. And then, somewhere around the 80% mark, things slow down. The interesting, generative part of the work is basically done. What’s left is the finishing: the tidying up, the edge cases, the last 20% that’s often less exciting than everything that came before it. And so, almost without noticing, you drift towards whatever comes next.
I’ve done this more times than I’d like to admit. Projects that were genuinely valuable, sitting at 80% completion for weeks, then months. A podcast format we trialled and got most of the way through setting up or an early outline for Feel-Good Productivity that I believed in, where I’d written maybe two-thirds of the chapters and then found a reason to focus elsewhere.
And I want to be clear – this isn’t the same as the 80/20 principle, which I do talk about a lot. The 80/20 principle is still about finishing things, just doing so efficiently. It assumes you cross the finish line; it just tells you where to focus your effort on the way there. What I’m talking about here is what happens when you don’t cross the finish line at all. That’s a different problem entirely.
And the frustrating thing is that in the moment, it doesn’t feel like avoidance. It feels like pragmatism. There’s always a reasonable justification for why the new thing deserves your attention right now, and why finishing the old thing can wait just a little bit longer. But I’ve been thinking about the cost of this more carefully recently, and I think we underestimate it in a couple of ways.
The first is the obvious one. An 80% finished project delivers zero value. The effort was real, the time was spent, but because it didn’t cross the finish line, none of that investment actually compounded into anything. In that sense, 80% done is not too dissimilar to 0% done in terms of what it actually produces.
But the second cost is subtler and I think it might be the bigger one. Every unfinished thing sits in the background of your mind, taking up a small but persistent amount of mental space. You don’t notice it most of the time, but it’s there. All these projects don’t disappear just because you’ve stopped actively working on them. They just become part of the background noise. And that noise is surprisingly draining.
Cal Newport talks about this in terms of open loops – the brain doesn’t like unresolved things. Closing a loop, even a small one, genuinely frees up cognitive resource that you didn’t know you were spending.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve been getting better at managing this, and here’s the rough approach I’ve been using.
The first thing is to actually write down everything that’s at 80% or more. Not your full project list, just the things that are genuinely nearly done. For most people, this list is shorter than they expect, but each item on it carries disproportionate weight relative to the effort it would take to close out.
Then I ask: which of these, if I finished it this week, would create the most forward momentum? Not which one is most important in the abstract. Which one, once completed, would actually unlock something else, or just get it out of my head?
And then I try to treat that finish line as the priority for the week, not the newest idea, not the most exciting thing on my list, but the thing that’s already mostly done and just needs me to cross it off properly.
This sounds almost comically simple, and it is. But there’s something about intentionally choosing to finish rather than start that requires a small but deliberate shift. Because starting is almost always more exciting than finishing. Starting feels like progress. Finishing can sometimes feel like admin. Except it isn’t. Finishing is what makes the starting worthwhile.
So if you’ve got a few 80% things floating around right now, I’d gently encourage you to pick one this week and just get it done. It probably won’t take as long as you think. And you’ll be surprised how much lighter you feel once it’s off your list.
Have a great week ahead.