I keep a mental list of personal projects that have been with me for years. None of them is hard. None depends on money, on permission, or on anyone saying yes. They simply never get finished.
Over the same stretch, I delivered dozens of far more complicated things — at the company, for clients, for other people. Things with more moving parts, more people involved, more ways to go wrong. Every one of those got finished.
For a long time I read this as a character flaw: no focus, no discipline, the whole familiar repertoire. It's a comfortable reading because it's simple. And it's simple because it's wrong.
What the finished projects have in common
Not one of them depended on my wanting to.
There was a meeting on the calendar. There was a room waiting. There was someone who was going to ask. The energy that moved the work forward didn't come from inside — it came from a structure built outside me, one that went on existing on the days I didn't feel like it.
Personal projects have none of that. They're made entirely of intention. And intention is a fuel that evaporates.
Structure is not the same as pressure
The temptation is to fix it with more pressure: goals, lists, apps, promises to yourself. I've tried all of them. They fail for the same reason — they're still internal structures, held up by the same willpower that has already proven unreliable.
What works is duller and more effective: turn the personal project into something another person is expecting. Set the date before it's ready. Tell the person who will ask. Publish the first part before the second one exists.
The question isn't “how do I force myself to do this?”. It's “what can I build out here that makes it happen without depending on my wanting to?”.
This piece, for example
This site existed for months as a folder on my computer. It only became a live page when I told someone I'd publish a piece that week.
It isn't elegant. But it works — even when the person I told, the one who now holds me to it and who I report back to, is a version of “me” created inside an AI prompt.