Starter or Finisher?

Are you a serial starter or finisher? Or are you one of the fabled focused ones who finish everything they touch?

Keith Robinson has a great post on Starting vs Finishing projects. I have always been a dreamer, full of ambitious ideas, and quickly take on the hot new idea or task with full enthusiasm, often at the expense of the half-dozen projects I have simmering on the back burner. My biggest problem is that I don't go back very often and revive any of those old tasks. Instead they gather dust, the good intentions I had when starting the project forgotten. And if I never perform the necessary CPR to bring the task back to life, the time I have spent on it is lost forever.

Case in point - at work, there are probably a dozen tasks and personal projects that I have had on my radar for any number of weeks. Little emergencies, shifting focus, and the most-touted excuse- procrastination- all play a hand.

This translates to my personal life as well. For 2 years I have been planning on building a web site for my fantasy football league, but that has never gotten off the ground. I am reading no less than 8 different books right now - 2 on professional topics like project and time management, 2 on the art of fiction writing, 3 technical tomes, and 1 for-pleasure fiction book. Now obviously I can't read all of them simultaneously. At least half haven't been opened in 3 months or more.

This phenomenon even translates to video games, something I look at as a hobby and an escape from the everyday stress of life. There are probably a few dozen games in my collection that I still haven't beaten. Of those, I am committed to completing probably 10 or so- my 360 games. The older generation Xbox and PS2 games are lost causes. The problem is that there are always new must-have games that I "have" to buy, perpetuating an endless cycle where those games that haven't seen the inside of my 360 in a few months get a little colder in their cases

Even my fiction writing was plagued with these problems - starting a story, getting a few pages in, then after the newness of the project wore off, abandoning it for the next great idea. But after hearing enough published authors state the obvious that you can't sell that you don't finish, I have committed myself to finishing my stories before moving onto the next one I have brewing in my head. That doesn't mean it will be sold, of course. But at least I have finished something.

Which is more than I can say for much of the rest of my life.