- A routine has no finish line. Treating it like a project to close makes it look like a failure every week.
- There are two project statuses that do not run on the same rules: the project you finish and the project you maintain.
- This article shows how to tell them apart, measure a rhythm instead of an end date, and keep your Monday review honest.
Open your project list. There is probably a line that says “Keep my settings notes up to date” and has been red for three weeks, right next to “Back up the PC”. The first will never be finished. The second takes one evening. Yet they sit in the same list, with the same deadline and the same feeling of being late.
The result is predictable. The line with no end turns into a permanent failure. You push it back, leave it as “to do”, then delete it without a word. The problem is not discipline. The model is wrong: you applied project logic to a routine.
Two statuses, two ways to run them
A finite project has an exit. Moving a photo library, publishing a guide, redoing a form. Its goal is to close it. It has a date, milestones, and a moment when you can archive it. A deadline suits it, because it describes a real end.
An ongoing project has no exit. Keeping documentation current, sorting your downloads every month, keeping a machine healthy. Its goal is to move forward regularly, without ever having to say “it’s done”. In his guide to managing projects in Obsidian, Tim Miller draws the same line between active projects, which you finish, and ongoing projects, which you keep moving forward over long periods. He puts chores, routines and areas of interest in the second group: anything that repeats without an end date.
You do not need a tool to apply this. A “status” column in a spreadsheet, a label in your task manager, or three headings in a plain text file are enough. What matters is the decision: each project carries a status, and that status tells you how to look at it.
The deadline invents a finish line
On a finite project, a deadline is a useful marker: it makes the end visible and forces you to break the work down. On an ongoing project, it invents a finish line that does not exist. Once the date passes without the “work” being done, the project moves into the failure pile, and dropping it becomes easier than picking it back up.
The problem lies in the nature of the goal, not in your willpower. A habit is not measured by a box ticked on a date, but by consistency. In a study by Lally and her co-authors, 96 students each adopted a daily behaviour for 84 days. The average time before the behaviour became automatic was 66 days, with a range from 18 to 254 days. A single missed day had little effect on progress; an accumulation of missed repetitions, even spread out, lowered the final level reached. The summary published by the British Psychological Society puts it plainly: repeat every day if you can, and do not panic over a day you skipped.
For an ongoing project, that is the useful information. What moves it forward is not the day you finished it, but consistency across several weeks. A deadline does not measure that. A rhythm does.
Be careful, though. This distinction does not say routines matter less than projects. It says they are not steered by the same question. For a finite project: “is it finished?”. For an ongoing project: “is it moving at the pace I set?”.
Replace the end with a minimum rhythm
An ongoing project needs a small, repeatable unit of progress. Not an annual objective, not a list of fifteen tasks. A minimum rhythm, written in numbers: “twenty minutes on Friday”, “two sessions a week”, “one review a month”.
Take a concrete case. You want to keep a note of your Windows settings up to date, the one where you record what you changed and why. Writing “update my settings note” tells you nothing about what to do. Writing “twenty minutes on Friday, before shutting down, one entry for each setting changed this week” gives you an action, a duration and a moment. If one week falls apart, the following Friday you only note what changed. The project was not interrupted. It kept its minimum rhythm.
The rhythm has to stay modest. If it is too ambitious, the first hard week turns it into a debt, and debt makes the project painful to restart. A rhythm you keep beats an ideal rhythm that breaks. You can raise it once it has become a habit.
The rhythm also tells you what to do when you miss a session. One skipped day does not make the project disappear. Two weeks in a row without keeping it are the real signal. Then you choose: either the rhythm is too heavy and you lower it, or the project has lost its reason to exist and you close it. The third option, the most common, is silence, which means deciding nothing at all. That is the only one to avoid.
If even this light rhythm does not hold, the cause is rarely the list. Why motivation drops on long projects is a separate question, and it needs its own diagnosis.
Three mistakes that show up everywhere
The first is putting the ongoing project in your active list. You will see it every morning without ever being able to finish it, and it will eventually wear you out. It is better to take it out of the active list and give it its own review block.
The second is never reviewing it. An ongoing project with no regular review disappears without a sound, because no deadline reminds you of it. Add it to your review rather than to your memory.
The third is the costliest: closing the project after one miss, when all it needed was a lower rhythm. This is the full-rebuild mistake, the one that sends you back to zero with a system that looks better and is just as fragile. In my view it is also the most common, because it looks like a spring clean rather than a failure.
What changes in your review
The weekly review reads each project with the question that fits it. For a finite project: what is the next action, and is it small enough to finish in one session? For an ongoing project: was the minimum rhythm kept last week, and if not, why? For an upcoming project: what is its start date?
This review takes a few minutes more than a simple scan of the list. In return it stops you feeling guilty about lines that, by nature, cannot be finished. It also shows at a glance what is really moving, without counting red boxes.
For the full framework of sorting and review, the Action management lesson sets the basics, and the Prioritization lesson decides what goes first. This article does not repeat those steps. It explains why the same list has to be read with two different views. If your list starts from a vague idea, the step from a fuzzy idea to a plan comes before this sorting.
What this changes for you
Take ten minutes and open your project list. For each line, write a status: upcoming, active, ongoing or archived. For each ongoing project, write a minimum rhythm in one sentence, with the duration, the frequency and the moment of the week.
Deliverable: a project list with one status per line, and at least one written rhythm for each ongoing project.
This week, keep ongoing projects in their own review block. If one of them goes more than two weeks without being kept, lower its rhythm before you think about closing it.
If you want to clear the basics on your PC first, so the first minutes of your routines start without friction, the free guide to 10 Windows settings is the right starting point.
Sources
Figures and links checked on 5 November 2026.
See the 3 sources of this article
- Tim Miller, “How to Manage Projects in Obsidian”, Obsidian Rocks, 13 October 2022 (updated August 2023), obsidian.rocks
- Phillippa Lally, Cornelia H. M. van Jaarsveld, Henry W. W. Potts and Jane Wardle, “How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world”, European Journal of Social Psychology, 2010, DOI
- Christian Jarrett, “How to form a habit”, BPS Research Digest, 6 October 2010, bps.org.uk