The futility of 'finishing'

I was taking an exam in a two-tiered classroom and I was on the balcony overlooking the other half of the class. The other students nonchalantly talked to each other and to me in a very relaxed manner, but I was stressed.  Only minutes remained in the allotted time for the exam, and I was on question 16 of 20. To my dismay, I realized that due to a printing mistake, the professor had changed question 16 with a note on the board at the front of the class. Then things got crazy. The other students obviously had finished early, because the seats were thinning out and the remaining students were talking more and more loudly. Some students had even arose from their seats on the first tier and were milling around at the front obstructing my view of the professors notes. Where was the order in this chaos!?! Then I saw that the professors notes had carried on down the chalkboard onto the wall and onto the floor and the milling students were physically standing on the last parts of these mid-exam changes. I was flustered and frustrated, so I leaned over the balcony to try to get a better view and shouted at the students to move out of the way. While leaning, I got a sudden spell of vertigo and so I quickly backed away from the balcony edge and took a new seat near the wall. I wasn't going to finish the exam, and I felt like a fool. Then I woke up.

I should note here that I get too much satisfaction out of finishing things. Some things ought to give satisfaction merely from finishing: high school and college degrees have celebratory graduation ceremonies as they should. But some things probably don't need celebration: achieving the empty inbox or finishing another Netflix series. My desire to finish things is probably why I feel so much dissatisfaction while consuming facebook, twitter, wikipedia, news media or pretty much anything on the internet. I've taken to listening to audiobooks in the lab using Hoopla and Overdrive, because every book has a final page. I can finish any book, even a boring one. (My annual book reading for three years prior to grad school averaged 31 (±18 SD) books/year, and in the last three years I've average 65 (±22) books/year with a T.test p value of 0.1. You might think it's not statistically significant, but I can tell you the increase was not random. And there have been some doozies: Groundwater Contamination in the United States was far from a page turner. See graphs)

For someone like me, my unfinished exam nightmare woke me up an hour before my alarm and all I could think of was all the things I had not yet finished and what I needed to do next to finish them. My first first-author manuscript needs a lot of textual and data analysis revision. My students in the class I'm TAing have writing assignments and exams that need grading. My everyday life leaves dishes and clothes that need washing. My pregnant wife and I are wondering when she'll ever be finished with pregnancy (Mid-January, but anyone with kids can comprehend the sentiment of the statement). And when am I ever going to finish parenting my kids?

I'm reminded that some things will never be finished (like parenting or learning), and others don't need to be finished.  Knowing when not to finish something is so context dependent that I haven't devised any generalizable rules. It all comes down to goals and objectives. I entered graduate school to achieve an objective: become more educated and strengthen my critical thinking skills (and hopefully a have a successful career afterwards, we'll see about that). In my first year of graduate school, I made a goal of reading 400 academic research articles in a year (anyone familiar with graduate studies knows that this is a fairly realistic goal). I catalogued my reading and it certainly drove me to read more articles in that first year than I would have. But a few months in, I realized that my goal did not always support my objective. I found myself reading every word of an article because I felt guilty counting it toward my 400 otherwise, and I wanted to achieve my goal. I wanted to finish every paper, all 400 of them. However, not all articles are created equal. There's a lot of research out there that may be tangentially related to what I'm working on, but the little I might gain from reading it is completely by a cursory look at the figures and a read-through of the abstract. I eventually dropped that goal for doing things that have a stronger impact on my objective. For years afterwards I felt like a failure whenever I saw my half empty catalog of 'read articles' on my cluttered fridge. But really, that failure was a success. I see that more clearly having thought through this post.

Revision note: During the writing of this post, I considered not finishing the post as a form of protest against my often selfish desire to finish.