“Fin­isha­bil­i­ty” is a qual­i­ta­tive term that describes the ease of being able to screed and fin­ish con­crete. But you could also use it in other con­texts, such as in com­mu­ni­ca­tion. If you’re equipped with a cer­tain fin­isha­bil­i­ty, peo­ple will lis­ten to you, under­stand you and coöper­ate with you.

Think of fin­isha­bil­i­ty as an anti­dote to infor­ma­tion over­load, as the Econ­o­mist’s Tom Standage sug­gests. One of the inte­gral fea­tures of the Inter­net are links between dif­fer­ent con­tents. Link­ing one con­tent to anoth­er pro­vides the read­er with more, relat­ed, deep­er con­tent — a foot­note 2.0 if you want. We could not imag­ine an inter­net with­out links, not as con­sumers or read­ers, and not as busi­ness­es rely­ing on the power of links; e.g. pub­lish­ers, search engines, etc..

What‘s Behind The Next Link?

We all click on links, lots of them, day by day. And then? After years of hav­ing clicked on ever­more links, there appears this feel­ing of being lost, of hav­ing wast­ed too much time surf­ing, or of hav­ing clicked on links just to pre­vent our­selves from doing other stuff which has to be done — there he is the pro­cras­ti­na­tion demon.

What a relief if there is some­one or some­thing who / which tells us to stop click­ing once more. Be it our sig­nif­i­cant other demand­ing qual­i­ty time, or a sim­ple search result answer­ing a ques­tion in a way that does­n’t need fur­ther request­ing. And this does not refer to sim­ple minds only, being sat­is­fied with sim­pli­fied views they get from TV, tabloids or cracker-barrel-talks. Even the most intel­li­gent of my friends cher­ish some fin­isha­bil­i­ty. To know there’s some end to a topic, some answer to a ques­tion is reas­sur­ing for all of us.

Adding Mean­ing To Things

For me, fin­isha­bil­i­ty has an even broad­er mean­ing than as an anti­dote to infor­ma­tion over­load. Fin­isha­bil­i­ty is giv­ing mean­ing to things and behav­iors. Fin­isha­bil­i­ty adds a reas­sur­ing ele­ment to con­tent, to action, etc.. It helps to go on, to pro­ceed, to reach the next level. Peo­ple who never get this feel­ing of fin­isha­bil­i­ty will most prob­a­bly have a feel­ing that they miss some­thing. And they prob­a­bly look for the miss­ing thing in the next sit­u­a­tion, and the next one.

Fin­isha­bil­i­ty means to be sat­is­fied with what I have, with what I bought or with what I just expe­ri­enced. You might argue that what I bought, saw, or expe­ri­enced had to entail fin­isha­bil­i­ty, oth­er­wise, I could not see it. For me, this is a ques­tion of my per­son­al pres­ence: If I “see” fin­isha­bil­i­ty in things and actions, I can go on and pro­ceed to the next level. I’m the one who decides about the fin­isha­bil­i­ty of things and actions, not some­body else.

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