The Value of Unfinished Projects
Happy May Day to all those that celebrate it.
As it’s the first of the month, I thought I’d take this opportunity to get a new daily blogging streak started, and hopefully we’ll go for a bit longer than last time.
Here’s why.
Accountability and The Value of Unfinished Projects
When I was first thinking of getting out of the seedy rat race that is direct response marketing, I figured I could stop writing sales letters so that other people could make passive income, and instead start writing things I enjoyed and make passive income myself.
And, wanting to do things properly, I managed to find myself a slightly cranky old mentor who has a several-decades long career as a writer, publisher and all the other relevant things.
And I’ve paid him a lot of money for advice and other bits.
Probably, he’s had to spend that money on various wigs as he tears his hair out because he gives me good advice, and then I allow my lack of focus to hinder my progress on all the things I should be good at.
I don’t want this to become a Dear Diary thing, (at least not yet,) so instead, I’ll tell you a piece of advice he gave me that’s stuck with me.
First, A Simple Exercise
At one point, the mentor asked me to write a list of total projects I have started. Then, put them into two lists; completed and uncompleted.
Of course, long time blog sufferers will know I have a lot of the latter.
With the uncompleted list, he had me write next to the project title the percentage, give or take, that’s completed.
So, if you’ve written a book but just need to write the epilogue, that’s 95% done.
If you’ve written 2-3 chapters of a book, it’s maybe 10% done.
And really, the exercise to this point is very effective anyway in the sense that it’ll give you an “easy wins” list and a “priority list.”
If you’ve got 3-5 projects that are 85% done, it’ll, all things equal, take you less time to get all three of those up, running and out in the world than finishing one project that’s 20% done.
And ideas don’t count – they’re 0% until you’ve built something.
So, you get your priority list and hopefully with this simple exercise, you get some easy wins. Over time, you get more easy wins.
For instance, I can create a short story collection pretty easily. I could probably create online courses with similar ease, and there are other projects of various kinds that I kind of have a rough feel for how long they’ll take, and I can adjust my schedule accordingly.
On the flip side, you’ve got the ever-shifting Vault project that I start, rip up, restart, and then abandon again and again. And, realistically, if I were honest with myself a lot sooner, we’d have figured out that we needed to refine the scope and then it might have a chance of not being something that just goes on forever.
The Value of “95% Done”
However, after compiling the lists and feeling a little shame at the probably 80% of projects that exist in some form or another, the mentor told me to do the next part of the exercise.
(For those of you playing along, feel free to do this before reading the next bit if you want, or just imagine doing so before skipping to the bit in the article where I get metaphorically smacked about by reality.)
The next part of the exercise had my mentor tell me to put a value of the project in terms of income or intellectual property – and it could be a ballpark figure, as opposed to exactly correct. “Give me a rough idea,” he told me.
So, I wrote down some ballpark figures.
Here’s how.
Let’s say you write a short story, and it sells a copy a month. £2. It’s not exactly lighting the world on fire, in fact the opposite, but you figure there are twelve months in a year and you’ve got the copyright for 70 years and so your figure quickly adds up and makes you think, “Jesus, I should publish some short stories pretty quickly.”
There’s a lot more to it than that, but that’s the gist of Valuing IP For Dummies™.
So, let’s say you have 15 unfinished short stories. They’re 95% done. Realistically, it’s a last copyedit before you make some book covers and put them on Amazon. You run the numbers and figure that if each short story is worth £2 a month, so £24 a year, so £240 over ten years and maybe £2000 over the course of its lifetime. Realistically, you know you’re massively underselling it, but you put that figure down.
£2000.
And you have 15 of those sitting on your hard drive waiting to be released! What a dolt; that value is £30,000.
Your mentor tells you to add up the value of your unfinished projects and the cost is staggering!
But that’s not the hard truth.
The hard truth is that you’ve practically spent that money in your head already, and your mentor is about to tell you that one bit of advice that you don’t want to hear:
Cross out all of those numbers. The value of an unfinished project is $0.
The Sober Numbers
An unfinished project is worth nothing in monetary terms, he explains, but I don’t really need it explaining. But we go back to the original task; finished versus unfinished.
The ratio of finished to unfinished projects is a key figure, because ultimately, if you run an expected value calculation based on it, your predicament either looks better or worse.
If you have a 50% Unfinished Projects ratio, then that means of every two things you start, one is a complete waste of your time. My mentor says, “Anything over 10%, if we’re honest, is a tragedy.”
Imagine my face when I heard that.
But there’s more than a monetary cost; every unfinished project is a chance you had to educate, entertain or otherwise make the life of your reader/customer/future fans/friends’ lives better.
The knock-on cost of unfinished projects is thus indeterminable except to say it’s bad.
The Dear Diary Conclusion
(And Focus for the Blog in May)
(As well as lack of practice)
With everything above said, with this blog for the month of May, the plan is to get my shit together threefold:
- Get back into practice with the blog. I had to restart this blog several times over to get back into the swing of developing useful information and sounding like myself in the writing.
- Start working on all those projects that you long suffering readers and friends have asked me about again and again (and honestly, I can’t apologise enough – the guilt is pretty bad, all jokes aside.)
- Combining the two above, I’ll be using the blog as an accountability diary as I start actually producing
The value of all my promises to this point has an expected value of, according to the guidelines set forth in this post, $0. To you, me, anyone.
Most of these projects, challenges and so on are 80% of the way there. The ones that aren’t need to be rethought so they can be in short order.
There are now 30 days left in May.
I’ll see you all on the next one.
– Jamie