Why you never finish what you start, and what to track instead
It is rarely discipline. It is that nothing you use can tell the difference between something moving and something you keep looking at. Here is the difference, and how to keep it in view.
The usual explanation is a character flaw: you get bored, you chase the new thing, you lack follow-through. Some of that is probably true of everyone. But it explains less than it seems to, because the same person who abandons nine things finishes the tenth, and the difference is rarely that they wanted the tenth one more. The difference is usually that they could see it.
Tidying feels like progress
Every tool you have kept your work in rewards activity that is not progress. Rewrite the description, reorder the list, add six more steps, move it to a nicer column: each of these changes a "last updated" somewhere and each feels like doing something. None of them moved the thing. Over months this trains you, quietly, to do the pleasant work of arranging instead of the uncomfortable work of the next step. It is not a character flaw. It is what the tool paid you for.
The pile hides the few
When everything you started is shown as equally live, the three things that are moving are lost among the twelve that are not, and the twelve are what you feel when you open the app. So you open it less. The things that were moving stop being seen, and things that are not seen stop moving. The pile did not make you lazy; it made the live ones invisible.
Stopping is not the same as failing
Most abandoned things were abandoned for a reason, and the reason was often good: the market was not there, the better version of the idea turned up, something more important arrived. But nothing keeps the reason. The thing just sits, unfinished, indistinguishable from the ones you meant to come back to, and every one of them reads as a failure because none of them reads as a decision.
What to track instead
Track how long since each thing actually moved, and make sure the number cannot be moved by tidying. Track one next step per thing, and notice which things have none, because those are the ones waiting on you rather than on time. Track the stage, in a handful of plain words, so a spark is not mistaken for a build. And when you stop, write down why and keep it, so the stopped thing is a decision you made rather than a debt you carry.
You can do all of this in a text file, and some people do. The trouble is that a text file has no clock, so the first item quietly stops being honest the first time you edit it without moving it.
Where Brassdeck comes in
It is built around exactly those four things. Each card has a clock that only moves on real progress: finishing a step, deciding the next one, changing the stage, parking or dropping. Quiet cards fade instead of turning red. Parked cards keep their date, dropped cards keep their reason, and both stay on the board, so what you look at is a record of decisions rather than a list of what you owe. The app is described honestly against the alternatives, including when you should use one of them.
What it costs
Free is 4 cards with 20 steps each, and it stays free. Every new workspace gets two weeks of the paid tier with no card asked for, and when that ends nothing is deleted or locked. See pricing for the rest, or read the manual first; it is public and there is a PDF.