Either finish something as quickly as possible, or as completely as possible. The closer you approach the center of these two extremes, the larger the percentage of your lifespan you’ll spend working on the project.
Either employ rapid-prototyping or perfectionism. That way you either finish something quickly, or rarely have to backtrack.
With rapid-prototyping,
you know you have to go back and fix it later, so you prioritize getting something substantial as fast as possible. Fixing it will take time, but at least you’ve created the first version in entirety.
With perfectionism,
finishing something will take a long time, but you’ll have nearly perfected it. This way, you will rarely have to backtrack and correct your work or fix something.
If you are somewhere in between
with your workflow, you’ll spend a lot of time trying to balance getting it right and getting it on paper. As you create more things, you’ll feel the need to continuously tweak them until they’re correct, and you’ll take a lot longer to finish the whole product (if you even get there). This is because you don’t have a solid priority…