Shipping it

The hardest part of a project you’ve started is finding an end to it

How many drawers full to the brim with ideas and abandoned projects do we all have in our offices? How many countless folders of orphaned files on our hard drives? getting things done and shipping them is one of the hardest parts of any project. Beginning is easy, but ending? Not so much. Especially if you want to end on a high note, then it becomes a different story.

This post is an ode to closure, to the ending, to the moment we release our ideas into the world. Few moments in a designer’s life are as satisfying and as painful at the same time as finishing a project. Not merely casting it aside as no longer interesting, when moving over to the shiny new thing. Shipping it is satisfying, because the project we’ve worked on for so long finally stops weighing on our mind like a stone. Shipping it is painful, because immersed in it, we see everything that could have been done better. No mistake escapes us, and with just one more week we could have gotten so much more out of it. But that thought is a fallacy. There is never a finished project we’re truly satisfied with — maybe for a brief moment, toasting the finished work with a cold glass of sparkling wine. But being satisfied with our work for too long means standing still and failing to develop further. That’s deliberately exaggerated here, and not meant too negatively. But it captures the core of the matter fairly well. Constant dissatisfaction, though, is an even bigger problem, one that far more often keeps us from ever finishing a project and putting it out into the world.

Year over year the innovation cycles keep getting shorter. One trend chases the next so fast that it becomes harder and harder to keep up. And artificial intelligence got thrown into the mix as well promising more results in less time and shipping products even faster. This situation overwhelms a lot of people.

To avoid all this frustration, my antidote is to keep chipping away at my ideas slowly and steadily. Each day I am closer to shipping it than I was the day before. And though the hype cycle demands compression of production timeliness I try to be unfazed by that demand. I ship when I am ready. But I have to ship. That is the important part.