In praise of loose ends

When you’re having to put aside some work in progress before you can fully complete it, a common approach is to find a “good stopping point”–finishing up some distinct unit, and leaving a clean break without loose ends. It feels tidy, and like the right thing to do. This is optimizing for a feeling of done-ness.

It also, counter-intuitively, makes it harder to resume work. There isn’t an obvious starting point, so the first thing you have to do when picking back up is make decisions about what to do next.

Writers use a tactic that runs utterly counter to this: deliberately stopping mid-paragraph, or mid-sentence, or even mid-word. It’s not satisfying. It’s not clean. But it makes it such that, when the author picks up their pen, there’s no question as to how to start or what to do next: they finish the word, then the sentence, then the paragraph. In so doing, context and momentum rebuild naturally. This is optimizing for undone-ness.

What can you leave undone that will leave a sense of frustration, so you’ll be almost compelled to start on it right away when you pick the work back up again?