How to finally finish the personal projects you keep starting

Throughout my life I’ve been the kind of person with many interests across different disciplines, always trying to make the most of each one. That’s next to impossible most of the time, because every year we pile on more responsibilities, more commitments, and more of what we want (or are expected) to contribute to the people around us. Trying to do something that genuinely fulfills you in the middle of all that gets complicated fast, so we start to fold in our pursuits. Some of them hurt to let go, because we really, really, really wanted to make them work somehow.

So here’s the question I want to sit with for a moment: what if there were a way to actually get those plans and projects done? Or at least get them far enough that you feel genuinely satisfied with the outcome, the experience, and the lessons you picked up along the way? The first step is to stop seeing each one as a giant mountain that looks impossible to climb. You have to start thinking in small chunks instead. Pieces you feel confident you can finish in 30 to 60 minutes, not days or weeks or months.

That shift, from mountain to chunks, sounds almost too simple to be worth saying out loud. It’s also the most useful thing I’ve learned about getting personal projects across the line. Let me walk through why it works, and how to set it up so it actually sticks.

Why we abandon the projects we care about

I’m Alan. I build small apps for the Apple ecosystem on my own, including a Kanban app called Hense and a quote-collecting app called Kandou. But long before any of that, I was (and still am) a person with a folder full of unfinished ideas.

Most personal projects don’t die because we stop caring. They die because of how we look at them. When you picture “write a book” or “learn to draw” or “build an app” as one enormous thing, your brain does the sensible thing and flinches. The goal is too big to hold, so every time you sit down you feel the entire weight of it at once, and that weight is exhausting before you’ve even started.

Take app development. It took me a long time to motivate myself to build my first app, because I had always seen the whole endeavor as something incredibly complicated and time-consuming. And it isn’t just the coding. It’s dozens, sometimes hundreds, of little decisions, all in service of making something useful for myself and maybe for other people around the world.

The mountain is real. But the mountain is also the problem, not your discipline, not your motivation, not some character flaw you were born with. The way you’re framing the work is what’s stopping you.

A big project is really a pile of small tasks

Here’s the reframe that changes everything: a big endeavor is just a series of small tasks and steps, tackled one by one, that slowly get you closer to the goal.

That sounds obvious when you read it, but almost nobody acts on it. We say “I want to learn to illustrate” and then feel bad that we haven’t, instead of writing down “watch one beginner tutorial” or “draw a single circle today.”

When you break a project into pieces small enough to finish in under an hour, two things happen. First, each piece stops being scary, because you genuinely believe you can do it. Second, you start to build momentum, and momentum is the real fuel for finishing things. Not one heroic burst of motivation that you wait around for. A steady chain of small, finishable steps.

This is the heart of a system called Kanban. It started on a Toyota factory floor decades ago, but the core idea is simple and works just as well for one person chasing a personal goal. You take the work, break it into small cards, and move those cards through stages as you make progress. I wrote a full explainer on what Kanban is if you want the background, but you don’t need the history to start using it today.

Seeing your progress is what keeps you going

Breaking work into small tasks is half of it. The other half is being able to see your progress.

This is the part most to-do lists get wrong. A list shows you what’s left, which is really just a list of everything you haven’t done yet. It’s a running tally of your debt. A board does the opposite. It shows you what you’ve moved, what you’re working on right now, and what’s already finished, all at the same time.

When you look at a column slowly filling up with finished cards, something clicks. You feel like you’re actually moving toward what you set out to do, because you can see it happening in front of you. That visible motion is what carries you through the days when you don’t feel especially motivated. The board holds onto your progress for you, and it shows it back to you every time you open it.

How to set up your first board

You don’t need anything fancy to start. Here’s the simplest possible version.

Pick one project. Just one. Resist the urge to put your whole life on a board the first time around.

Make three columns:

• To Do: the small pieces, each one finishable in 30 to 60 minutes
• Doing: what you’re actively working on right now (keep this short, ideally one or two cards)
• Done: everything you’ve finished

Then break your project into those small cards and drop them in To Do. Not “learn to illustrate.” Instead: “watch one intro tutorial,” “draw basic shapes for 20 minutes,” “sketch one simple character.” Each card should feel almost too easy. That’s the entire point.

Let me give you a real example from my own life. I’ve always wanted to learn how to illustrate and make animation. But I come from a home where the unspoken rule was that if you weren’t born with some “special gift” for a thing, you shouldn’t even dare to try it. That belief sat on me for years. What finally let me start wasn’t suddenly deciding I was gifted. It was convincing myself to start really, really simple, with steps small enough that they felt achievable no matter how talented I was or wasn’t. A board full of tiny, doable cards is permission to begin badly. And beginning badly is how everyone begins.

This is exactly why I built Hense. I wanted a Kanban board that lived natively on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no account to create and nothing nagging me. Something I could open, drop a few small cards into, and close again in the time it takes to drink a coffee. If you’re curious why I built it instead of using something that already existed, I wrote about that whole journey separately.

Start with one project this week

If you take one thing from this, let it be this: finishing the things you care about has less to do with discipline and more to do with how you frame and see the work. Make the mountain smaller by cutting it into chunks, and then put those chunks somewhere you can actually watch them move. The visible progress is what ends up pulling you forward on the days you’d otherwise stall.

So pick one project you’ve been carrying around in your head, the one that hurts a little to keep putting off. Break it into five small cards. Put them on a board. Move one card today. That’s the whole method, and it’s enough to start.

If you want a board for it, Hense is the app I built for exactly this, for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Working on something you keep meaning to finish? I’d genuinely love to hear what it is. Get in touch.