The Shelf of Dead Projects Is the Most Honest Thing in My Workshop

There's a shelf above my bench that I've stopped apologising for. It runs most of the length of the wall, it's a piece of timber I cut badly a while back, and it holds a row of things I started and did not finish. For a long time I thought of it as evidence. Now I think of it as a filing cabinet.

What's actually up there

Start with the objects, because the objects are the argument.

There's the half-built plywood shelf unit for the hallway. Drawn properly in CAD, dimensions checked twice, three of the four panels cut. It stalled because I ordered the wrong thickness of ply and never got round to sorting the exchange. That was three winters ago. The offcut is still leaning against the wall, going slowly grey.

Then the MIDI controller. Five pads soldered, seven to go. The enclosure printed fine, the firmware compiles, the whole thing is maybe ninety minutes from working. I stopped because I reached the point where the work stopped being interesting and started being repetitive — forty minutes of soldering with no decisions in it.

Then the hand-bound notebook with the wobbling spine. Lovely paper, terrible stitching. I made it to learn a stitch and I learned the stitch. Whether it survives a fortnight in a rucksack was never really the question.

And the risograph zine. Two colours, twelve pages, mocked up on the kitchen table one Sunday afternoon, never sent to print. That one still niggles, because I know exactly why it didn't happen: the minimum print run cost more than I was willing to spend on something nobody had asked for.

Two very different kinds of stopping

People lump all abandonment together and call it procrastination. I don't think that's right. There are at least two species up on that shelf, and only one of them is about discipline.

The first is the thing you stopped because it got hard. That's the plywood. Every time I look at it I feel a small, correct tug of guilt, because the only thing between me and a finished shelf is a phone call and a van.

The second is the thing you stopped because you stopped wanting it. The MIDI controller is that. Somewhere around pad six, the project I wanted quietly turned into an exercise in soldering. I'd learned what I set out to learn. Carrying on would have been stubbornness dressed up as commitment, and I've got form for that.

Telling those two apart is the whole skill. I'm not especially good at it. I get it wrong in both directions — finishing things I should have walked away from, and walking away from things that needed one more afternoon.

Taste moves faster than output

Here's the reframe that actually stuck. Taste moves faster than output. Always has. The things on that shelf are mostly the residue of a version of me from eighteen months ago who wanted slightly different things from the version of me standing here now.

That's not waste. That's data. Half-finished objects are one of the few honest records you get of what you were actually interested in, as opposed to what you told people you were interested in. A to-do list records intentions. A shelf records behaviour.

I can look at the notebook and see that I like the idea of bookbinding more than I like bookbinding. I can look at the zine and see that I want the finished object but not the risk of paying for it. Those are useful things to know about yourself, and you only find them out by getting far enough in to find out.

The money question, answered honestly

Some of it was a genuine waste of money. I'm not going to dress that up. A sheet of decent ply is not cheap, the resin for the coasters wasn't either, and the returns window on that timber merchant closed long ago.

But here's what I've noticed: almost none of the regret is about the cash. It's about the space the stuff takes up and the low hum of obligation it generates. Money you've spent is gone and quiet. Objects you've abandoned sit there radiating disappointment, which is a much more expensive thing to own.

So I've changed how I buy for projects. Smaller quantities. Cheaper first attempts. If it survives version one, then I'll spend properly on version two. Screwfix and Toolstation returns have saved me more grief than any productivity system I've ever tried.

Three questions before something goes on the shelf

I use these now, and they're not productivity advice so much as a way of being honest with myself:

• Would I start this again today, from scratch, knowing what I know now?
• Is the bit I'm avoiding the boring 20%, or is it the actual point of the thing?
• Do I want the object, or do I just want to be the sort of person who made it?

That last one has killed more projects than the other two combined, and every time it's been right.

What I've stopped doing

The January ritual, for a start. The annual "right, this year I'll finish the shelf" performance, which lasted about four days and mostly involved moving things around.

Buying storage for it. That's just tidying the problem into a nicer box.

And calling it a graveyard. A graveyard is somewhere you put things to be forgotten. This is more like a pinboard of everything I've been curious about in the last few years, including the ideas that turned out to be boring once I got close to them.

The one that did get finished

The bench hook. Two bits of scrap, one afternoon, no plan. It gets used every single week and it's the least ambitious thing on the shelf. There's no ratio to be learned from that, no formula about shipping small things. Just an observation: the projects that survive are usually the ones where making the thing was always more interesting than having made it.

I still haven't fixed the plywood. But I know now whether I want to, and that's most of the battle. The shelf stays.