Are You Coming Back?

The other day, I looked out at my deck and saw my unmistakably unfinished DIY furniture project still sitting upside down exactly where I had left it. The wrong screws were scattered across the seat alongside the rest of the hardware, as though I’d been interrupted in the middle of assembling it and fully intended to come back five minutes later.

I didn’t.

Once I noticed it, I started seeing unfinished things everywhere. The garden slowly disappearing under weeds. The Substack I’ve been talking about for months. The bookkeeping that’s always one month behind. The testimonials I still haven’t collected. The website we started but never finished. The Business Development Bible vibe-coding project that’s still somewhere between an idea and a functioning tool. A box of my mom’s old photographs I’ve wanted to organize for years.

Then the list kept growing.

There were home projects. Creative projects. Business ideas. Little things. Big things. Things I’d forgotten were even unfinished.

By the time I stopped writing, I realized something.

They weren’t unfinished projects.

They were unfinished promises.

That realization has been following me around ever since.

Not because I feel particularly guilty about any one item on the list. The deck furniture will eventually get assembled. The weeds will eventually get pulled. The bookkeeping will get done because, unlike the Substack, the IRS has a way of creating urgency.

What I’m more curious about is why the list exists in the first place.

Why do so many of us collect unfinished promises?

I don’t think it’s laziness. If anything, the people I know with the longest lists are the most ambitious people I know. They’re curious. They have ideas. They see possibilities everywhere. They get excited about building things, improving things, and creating things.

Beginnings are intoxicating.

They’re full of optimism. Full of possibility. A beginning asks only one thing of us: to believe something could become extraordinary.

Finishing asks something entirely different.

It asks us to edit. To refine. To make decisions. To decide something is good enough. To stop imagining what it cthat ould become and accept what it actually is.

That’s a very different kind of work.

I’ve also started wondering if unfinished things weigh on us in ways we don’t fully appreciate. Not because any one of them is especially demanding, but because each one quietly asks for a tiny piece of our attention.

Every time I walk onto the deck, I see that upside-down furniture.

Every time I open my laptop, I see the unfinished website.

Every time I think about writing, the Substack taps me on the shoulder.

Individually, none of them is heavy.

Collectively, they become a kind of mental background noise.

Unfinished promises don’t disappear.

They quietly take up residence in our minds.

Of course, not every unfinished promise deserves to be kept.

Some belong to an earlier version of ourselves. Some ideas have simply run their course. Some projects served their purpose long before they were ever completed.

Maybe the goal isn’t to finish everything.

Maybe it’s to become more intentional about the promises we continue making to ourselves.

Some deserve to be finished.

Others deserve to be released.

But very few deserve to linger indefinitely in the space between the two.

Coaching Corner

This week, make a different kind of list.

Not everything you need to do.

Everything you’ve started but never finished.

Then look at each one and ask yourself: