Weirdly enough this came up with my life coach the other day. She said that there's a natural progression of stages for any creative work. She quoted some book or other, but she said the stages were something like, inception (having the idea), discovery (figuring out how you'll do it), doing it, then finishing it - practically and emotionally.

She thinks modern society is too obsessed with doing the work that we skip over the step of finish things properly. The result is that we don't emotionally or practically close the loop on our work. Everything is left in a "oh maybe I'll come back to that" stage.

Finishing something should involve a moment of reflection where we notice and accept that we're no longer its steward. Its both a time for celebration (Yay! We did it!) and, often it involves a bit of morning. ("Oh, that period in my life is over forever now. Huh.").

In the circles she moves in people think skipping over that step of closure is what causes burnout. For a dozen reasons we're just too keen to start the next thing, so we don't appreciate the work we've done. We don't celebrate. We don't move on. We don't clean up our code, even when we know we should. We end up feeling like we're juggling a dozen balls, because we're not really putting any of them down.

I don't know the solution to this in the workplace. But for my own work, I'm trying to find stopping points where I can take half a day off, go out for dinner and reflect on the passing of what I've accomplished. It feels really wholesome.