Knowing When to Stop Is a Skill, Not a Mood

There is a point past which further work makes a thing worse, and finding it is genuinely difficult.

Everyone learns this by overshooting. You are refining something, it is going well, and you keep going because it keeps improving. Then at some point it stops improving and you fail to notice, and you continue, and now you are removing what was good in pursuit of a version that only exists in your head. By the time you see it, the thing has lost the liveliness it had an hour earlier and acquired a kind of overworked flatness that no further effort can undo. It is a specific and memorable disappointment.

The trouble is that stopping too early is also a real failure, and it looks exactly the same from the inside as stopping at the right moment. Both feel like a slight itch to keep going. Distinguishing them is not a matter of rules. It is a matter of having overshot often enough to recognise the particular feeling that precedes it, which is usually a shift from responding to what is in front of you towards chasing an ideal image that the material was never going to reach. The tell, when you learn to catch it, is that you have stopped looking at the object and started looking past it.

One thing that helps is separating the sessions. Work that looks unfinished at nine at night frequently looks complete at eight the next morning, and the difference is not the object. Makers who set things down and look again in a different light and a different mood tend to overwork less. There is also an argument for accepting that small irregularities are not defects to be hunted down. They are simply the difference between a thing that was made and a thing that was produced, and hunting every one of them down usually costs more than it returns.