The final stretch is not the same as the first 90%. You don't know what you don't know at the start, you don't have formed ideas or boundaries to butt up against and so progress is easy. As you create, you have gained more knowledge and now have to consider you surroundings, the problem space becomes less open.
The closer you get to completion the less space to work in, you likely have greater taste, ideas which are good enough for the first 90% are no longer good enough.
So better taste and far less acceptable solutions due to increased dependencies.
You also can see parts which were previously acceptable as now not so.
To top it off you have the emotional and ego side at play near the finish line. Is this good enough? This could be done better, etc.
I think that mixture of better taste, more dependent parts and ego make the last part the hardest. I also feel that the finish line being close isn't a strong of a motivator as ego is a demotivator. Whereas, at the start ego has no effect as you don't know anything, you can't be mad because you're new, it's all one big playground.
One cause of this is that folks finish the first 90% and are surprised to discover the second 90% still undone. It feels, intuitively, as if you should be able to subtract. (Everything - 90%) should be around 10%, right? No. It's like relativity or something. It doesn't work the way we naively expect.
Even experienced people fall into this trap again and again.
If that's the issue, then remembering to double your timeline estimates helps a lot. Fallback is to have a boss who doubles them for you. If you haven't set aside time for "debugging" and "iteration", you can use those labels for the second 90%. Sometimes they're even accurate labels.
Personally, I tend to put off unpleasant/difficult parts of a project so I can make rapid initial progress. I am ultimately confronted by a moment when all of my remaining tasks are those I put off, and it's off-putting. Fortunately I can usually overcome this by mentally shifting gears to more of a slow grind mode.
Within myself I notice that the project becomes boring when there is nothing new left to be learned from it. Depending on the project this could happen at 50% completion or 90% completion. Take scientific research for example. For me there is a lot of motivation to figure things out, to fill the gaps, to make sure everything is solid. But then there is the mundane part of putting it into text and publishing. And my energy is not in there. I already know what will go into that paper, I know getting it out will count as "success" and I know it should be shared. But my libido is not in it.
Another thing - the end of a big project signifies a big change. If you worked on something for a long time, what will you do once it's finished? Norman Finkelstein in one of his interview put it like that (paraphrasing): "I think some people genuinely don't want to end the conflict [between Israel and Palestine] because they built their whole life around it. In the past it was a problem for me as well. I have spent my whole academic career writing about this conflict. I read enough books to fill this room. Literally. If the conflict ends tomorrow - what am I going to do with my life?".
> Within myself I notice that the project becomes boring when there is nothing new left to be learned from it.
Yes, I have similar issue with motivation I have noticed, if I am presented with a problem to solve and I can see the solution before implementing anything, I am not really interested in coding the solution and testing it. I.e. the abstract or logical proof of the solution is sufficient for me (the fun part), but the actual coding, fixing some environmental problem and details of creating a working solution are (usually) much more boring - because they are almost always essentially the same.
I've fallen for this trap a few times before. It's a collision of pareto principle and nirvana fallacy. Diminishing returns dominate the last 20%, causing burnout, and you're held in the tension between sunk cost fallacy and perfectionism. The former turning burning ambition into an anchor around one's neck, and the latter slowly decimating any hope of release with perpetual scope creep.
The best strategy to avert this the next time around is to vastly undershoot on goal size. The scope creep will still happen because we can't change our nature, but the project has a much better chance of reaching completion.
The final stretch is not the same as the first 90%. You don't know what you don't know at the start, you don't have formed ideas or boundaries to butt up against and so progress is easy. As you create, you have gained more knowledge and now have to consider you surroundings, the problem space becomes less open. The closer you get to completion the less space to work in, you likely have greater taste, ideas which are good enough for the first 90% are no longer good enough. So better taste and far less acceptable solutions due to increased dependencies. You also can see parts which were previously acceptable as now not so.
To top it off you have the emotional and ego side at play near the finish line. Is this good enough? This could be done better, etc.
I think that mixture of better taste, more dependent parts and ego make the last part the hardest. I also feel that the finish line being close isn't a strong of a motivator as ego is a demotivator. Whereas, at the start ego has no effect as you don't know anything, you can't be mad because you're new, it's all one big playground.
One cause of this is that folks finish the first 90% and are surprised to discover the second 90% still undone. It feels, intuitively, as if you should be able to subtract. (Everything - 90%) should be around 10%, right? No. It's like relativity or something. It doesn't work the way we naively expect.
Even experienced people fall into this trap again and again.
If that's the issue, then remembering to double your timeline estimates helps a lot. Fallback is to have a boss who doubles them for you. If you haven't set aside time for "debugging" and "iteration", you can use those labels for the second 90%. Sometimes they're even accurate labels.
Personally, I tend to put off unpleasant/difficult parts of a project so I can make rapid initial progress. I am ultimately confronted by a moment when all of my remaining tasks are those I put off, and it's off-putting. Fortunately I can usually overcome this by mentally shifting gears to more of a slow grind mode.
I am writing to add two other possibilities.
Within myself I notice that the project becomes boring when there is nothing new left to be learned from it. Depending on the project this could happen at 50% completion or 90% completion. Take scientific research for example. For me there is a lot of motivation to figure things out, to fill the gaps, to make sure everything is solid. But then there is the mundane part of putting it into text and publishing. And my energy is not in there. I already know what will go into that paper, I know getting it out will count as "success" and I know it should be shared. But my libido is not in it.
Another thing - the end of a big project signifies a big change. If you worked on something for a long time, what will you do once it's finished? Norman Finkelstein in one of his interview put it like that (paraphrasing): "I think some people genuinely don't want to end the conflict [between Israel and Palestine] because they built their whole life around it. In the past it was a problem for me as well. I have spent my whole academic career writing about this conflict. I read enough books to fill this room. Literally. If the conflict ends tomorrow - what am I going to do with my life?".
> Within myself I notice that the project becomes boring when there is nothing new left to be learned from it.
Yes, I have similar issue with motivation I have noticed, if I am presented with a problem to solve and I can see the solution before implementing anything, I am not really interested in coding the solution and testing it. I.e. the abstract or logical proof of the solution is sufficient for me (the fun part), but the actual coding, fixing some environmental problem and details of creating a working solution are (usually) much more boring - because they are almost always essentially the same.
I've fallen for this trap a few times before. It's a collision of pareto principle and nirvana fallacy. Diminishing returns dominate the last 20%, causing burnout, and you're held in the tension between sunk cost fallacy and perfectionism. The former turning burning ambition into an anchor around one's neck, and the latter slowly decimating any hope of release with perpetual scope creep.
The best strategy to avert this the next time around is to vastly undershoot on goal size. The scope creep will still happen because we can't change our nature, but the project has a much better chance of reaching completion.