On Bringing Projects to an End

Long hair, photo diaries, and disavowing the COVID era

A thousand-odd photos from F91W.

Last week, some people—though fewer than I expected—looked back on the events of three years ago when the UK first went into lockdown. It feels both too recent to process and too irrelevant to present concerns. I did a quick review of my diary at that time and found it pretty mundane, concerned mainly with the claustrophobia of being at home than anything deeper. Amidst these entries, I found a photo of myself with short hair and no beard and thought: “Ah, I’m one of those people who let themselves go during the lockdown.”

Selfie at the beginning of lockdown

I grew it out because long hair is low maintenance. Short hair looks messy after a couple of weeks, whereas with long hair the mess is hardly noticeable. As with a beard, long hair is less of a battle with entropy. Being clean-cut can take an extra ten minutes a day, potentially spending half a year shaving over the course of your life. It is fun to let your hair down, even if it does get in the way sometimes. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson: Long hair has many pains, but short hair has few pleasures. But, in the spirit of disavowing the COVID period, I have decided to get it cut.

Three years later... the things I’ve seen

Apart from letting myself go, my other lockdown project, which began on 1 April 2020, was to post a daily photo from my daily walk. It sounds banal in retrospect; indeed, there are millions of people who are constantly posting photos of themselves. For me, though, it felt like a big deal. I was putting myself out into the world, not hiding behind client work. Sometimes the photos were good, often they were bad; I was interested in why. I treated it as an experiment and an opportunity to learn.

Once you’ve been doing a project for a while, especially a daily project, it can be hard to stop. That which was intentional becomes a habit. I barely think about whether to post something; I just do it. But I have decided it is time to bring the project to an end, exactly three years after it started. Starting the project was fairly arbitrary, and finishing it will have to be the same. But why stop at all? As with cutting my hair, the main reason is to draw a line under the COVID period.

So what tentative conclusions have I reached?

1. Treat projects as play

The joy of a particular self-initiated project is that it could be playful. Play is not so much an activity as an attitude: anything can be made into a game. I don’t understand how anyone who has played Tetris doesn’t love loading the dishwasher. So how do you turn an activity into play?

• Establish rules, however arbitrary.

• Establish boundaries where those rules apply.

• Get continuous feedback that helps you improve your mastery.

• Once a game is complete, start afresh.

One reason people stop personal projects is that they think they’re not good enough. They see their current ability as an essential characteristic. But sensing inadequacy is in itself good because it means you can spot areas to improve. It can be turned into a positive by seeing it as a step on the path to mastery.

2. Anti-social Media

The daily photo was also an experiment in using social media. I made the rule that I wasn’t going to follow anyone on the Instagram account, I didn’t want people following just so they could get a follow back. I wish all following were anonymous and we could select what we consume without concern for social niceties. Because the quality of the photos is so erratic, I think you probably need to have an interest in my life to want to keep up. After three years, 149 people follow the account on Instagram.

3. No one cares

People sometimes fear posting online because they are worried about being judged, but it’s hard to get people to care about anything you post let alone to care enough to judge. The more you post, the more you realise that people are caught up in their own dramas. They don’t have any time to think about what you’re doing. The relentless production of a daily photo doesn’t lend itself to making an impact. Tehching Hsieh undertook year-long projects, but—crucially—waited for them to be over before putting them out into the world.

4. Trust your instincts

Daniel Pink talks about the two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. The former aims at meaning, the latter at fame and money. The latter works for a while but can fizzle out because the activity is not inherently valuable. Thus, it’s important never to lose your own sense of what is good. If someone praises something of yours you think is bad then thank them and ignore their praise. There is a temptation to do more of what people like because we like to get good feedback, but all you can really rely on to guide you in life are your instincts. Trust them.

5. Don’t plan

Human beings are not rational animals but rationalising animals. The best way to come up with a theory about why something happens is to try doing it in practice and then reverse engineer it. Everyone likes planning because you don't have to do the work, but all that planning creates expectations that make the actual work harder. Far better, I think, to start the work and then create the plan later.