Time kills enthusiasm — here's how I avoid starting projects I won't finish

I've been an entrepreneur for about 22 years. In that time, I've made a serious run at starting at least 12 products (higher depending on how you count). Of those 12, 4 of them never saw the light of day. They died after I had put in some time and effort, but before being tested by the market. Why did that happen? What causes products to die before really getting out there?

There are a lot of reasons why products die, and most of them are talked about regularly as serious risks founders need to monitor. There's an endless supply of books, videos, and blog posts about running out of money, failing to market your product correctly, or getting outmaneuvered by the competition. Those are real risks that kill their fair share of ideas, but the thing that kills more products in their infancy than anything else is the death of enthusiasm. Genuine enthusiasm is a limited resource. When it dies, the rest of the dominoes often fall like a house of cards (so to speak).

I'm not saying nobody ever talks about the importance of enthusiasm. I think everybody knows that when you run out of emotional steam for working on your product, it inevitably dies. Usually, though, I see it mentioned as a joke: "i can't ever stick with my side hustles haha why am i like this". The death of enthusiasm is a serious threat that can and should be mitigated. The good news is that there are a few simple steps you can take to make sure you finish the next project you start.

Estimate your interest
The most important thing about managing enthusiasm is realizing it drains over real time. It doesn't matter if you're working full time, a few hours a week, or just thinking about it. Your strategic enthusiasm reserves for this idea are draining as time passes.

That means an estimate of your interest needs to be a number of real days or weeks. For the kind of people that play on hard mode, the timer starts as soon as they have the idea. For those of you playing on the easier setting, the timer starts when work actually begins.

In my experience, you don't get to choose how your enthusiasm clock works. Just be honest with yourself. If you have an exciting idea today and wait a month to start on it, will you be just as excited as you are today? What about two months from now? Three?

When you've decided which camp you're in, estimate your interest in your current idea as a number of whole days or weeks. Because your enthusiasm is draining regardless of how much you work, I suggest creating an idealized estimate assuming you were going to work on this idea exclusively. If this was the only thing you worked on, how long do you see yourself being genuinely excited about it? A few days? A week? What if you spent the whole year working on just this idea and nothing else? Would that be awesome or did the thought of that make you worry you'd miss out on some other opportunities? Use your head and your heart to find the sweet spot.

Estimate the work
This estimate doesn't need to be great. You just need a ballpark. If you don't already have a process for estimating the work to make something new, I recommend our sketching process. A quick version only takes an hour or two and at the end you'll have a pretty good idea of what you'll want to make.

Take a look at each page of your sketches and turn them into a number of hours of work. It's important that the work estimate be in hours (not points or anything else) for the next step to work.

Estimate the work timeline
How many hours per day or week are you willing to devote to this product? Given the work estimate above, how many days or weeks will it take for you to finish making what you want to make?

Let's use an example. Say you sketched out an idea you think will take about 40 hours of work, but you can really only squeeze in about 2 hours of work a week (on Wednesdays after your hot yoga class). At that rate, your timeline is about 20 weeks. If you don't like the answer you get, is there something you can shift around in your schedule to do more work on this idea each week?

When you've made your best assessment, it's time for a reckoning.

Do your estimates add up?
You see where this is going. If the work timeline is shorter than your estimated interest, you've got the gumption to take this to completion. On the other hand, if your work timeline is longer than your estimated interest you're probably going to run out of steam before getting where you want to go.

Keep in mind that the starting date might change things for you. If your enthusiasm clock is already counting down, can you start soon enough? If the numbers don't work out, consider making a change to save yourself the heartache of another incomplete idea:

• If you review your sketches, is that something you can cut to make the work timeline shorter?
• Do you have another idea in an area where you have more enduring enthusiasm?
• Do you have a less complicated idea in the same area?

Isn't this just project management?
You got me. This is just a few basic project management steps in a nutshell. In my defense, I'm blogging about project management a lot while we're building Burndown, a new project management tool that helps you get the important work done and focus on the big picture. If these steps sound like a good idea to you and you'd like a tool that makes it a lot easier, join the mailing list to get access to our upcoming beta.

Honestly, it's best if you do the above steps continuously while you're making anything. But, if you're not ready to do regular project management stuff yet, even doing these steps one time before you start can save you a lot of trouble.

Good luck on your next idea!