Hemingway supposedly stopped writing each day mid-sentence, so that the next morning he knew exactly where to begin. Whether or not he really did, the instinct is sound, and it generalises far beyond writing.
Finishing is expensive
The last ten per cent of anything costs about as much as the first ninety. Not because the work is harder, but because finishing requires closing every open question at once, and open questions are the fuel you use to start again tomorrow. Close them all and you wake up to a cold engine.
Stop while you still know what comes next. Momentum is easier to keep than to manufacture.
Unfinished is not the same as abandoned
The distinction matters. Abandoned work has no next step, only guilt. Deliberately unfinished work has exactly one obvious next step, written down, waiting. The trick is to leave the note.
- End the session on the easiest remaining task, not the hardest.
- Write one line about what you were about to do. Not a plan, a sentence.
- Leave the file open. Friction at the start of a session is the real enemy.
A useful discomfort
It feels wrong at first. There is a small satisfaction in tying off a day cleanly, and this asks you to give it up. What you get in return is that the blank page never really appears, because you have already written the first line of tomorrow.
