The real reason it stays open
She had the discipline. The work still never closed.
A learner preparing for a demanding qualification sits down to work on the one thing that matters. She stays with it for five or ten minutes. Then her attention drifts and she is somewhere else, doing something smaller. She has treated the work as a state she must hold for hours, and the hours never come together.
Once the work stopped being an open ended stretch of time to endure and became a single defined unit with a clear finish, her unconscious had a finish to reach. The drift fell away because there was now an end point to arrive at.
The thing was never unfinished because she lacked discipline. It was unfinished because nothing inside her knew where it ended.
