Get your friends to help you.
Finishing in isolation always ends up with you chasing your tail. Snare needs work. Kick is weak. Blah blah blah. Give it to a friends, say what do you think I need to do to finish this song. Do what they say and call it a night. Start something new.
Spent way too much time tweaking instead of creating. This will change this year…
I actually disagree with that. Friends will say ‘yeah that’s great’ because they’re your friends and don’t want to upset you. Also why would you trust critical decisions to friends who may not have a clue?
Better to leave a track alone for a couple of weeks until you’ve forgotten it, and then listen critically. Everything you missed before will just pop out at you.
Then make a list of those issues and fix them.
changing your approach can help.
When using Ableton extensively I used to get bored of my best ideas due to listening to them on repeat so much, over analysing and tweaking during the writing process. It broke my heart repeatedly, n my work was very rigid in a way. How do you know when its finished? does it need more?
Now I Record live hardware jams, sometimes precisely sequenced and some purely improvised n multitrack em into ableton for mixing. Ive come to embrace the loose nature of the process n way prefer the outcome.
bad mistakes diminish the more you practice n i find im more in tune with the composition and where it should go in the moment rather than trying to adhere to a rigid idea.
I’ve got the perfect friend for this task. Can’t count they number of times this honest piece of shucks made me want to hang myself from a beam and do pull ups.
Absolutely this. if you get feedback from your friends make sure you’re honest with yourself on whether they will give you real feedback. And this also goes for posting online, it’s no good going and sticking a track on a forum full of people patting each other on the back. The internet can be a great source of feedback but only if you don’t just chuck it somewhere where everyone is gonna say “great stuff!” So that you listen to their track and do the same. Leave your stuff, forget about it and come back. Or have someone else mix it then relisten
my dad said my music was “awful” last week.
don’t listen to anyone, just use your intuition.
if your intuition isn’t good you’re sort of screwed anyway.
or… maybe they’re right 
play some tracks from established artists who you vibe with and slip in one or two of your tracks. then you ask your friends what they think so they don’t just give you blind kind encouragement and make them actually analyze the song in a non pressure situation
These three took two years to get released:
https://www.whatpeopleplay.com/albumdetails/Michal-Ho-Multicut-EP/id/163625
Still not sure if they’re actually finished. 
Very interesting thread,
I have spent years with ableton live before discovering the octatrack 1,5 year ago, and I’m currently in the process of trying to arrange proper tracks from a 2h OT live set,
I could not use the OT alone for this task so I paired it with ableton live to automate the crossfader and some track parameters, while using the Arranger within the OT.
Then I got both worlds, the immediacy and limitations of the machine AND the linear visualisation from the DAW and precise automations.
Then I have to record the OT out while receiving automation from ableton live. I for now just recorded beta-tracks in one stereo channel, but I plan on doing a take for each OT’s track (that’s ok because fader is automated),
But I’m afraid I’m gonna loose the energy of the live jams during this process (I have in the past been able to spent a year on a track to actually find in the end, that the final one was just a shitty bloated derivative from the jams that lost all energy and fun…)
Now I try to work faster, don’t overthink, FOCUS ON THE SONG STRUCTURE, and allways think LESS IS MORE. But it’s hard, indeed very hard to get busy with a recipe and not overdo anything to death…
Thanks for all your inputs, great advices in there!
Haha, at the time of writing I was actually at the airport on my way home 
But yeah, Gillis, Lombok, Ubud, Lembongan and many other places. Indonesia is great <3
this is just where I’m at right now. got a good groove, and thinking in making a buildup, that is way too compilcated. cutting away that first minute of needless introduction --> suddenly it’s a track I want to listen to, and to present too.
figured out a weird problem this weekend
finishing tracks was hard because of using too nice harmony
changed some parts to be more dissonant, and … wow! 
i think it was slavoj zizek, who is churning out a book every year or so, who once said in an interview, that he didn’t like to write new and interesting stuff, so in order to finish he just wrote down really quick some new main idea, and then pretend that it wasn’t his writing, but the writing of some other person which he was supposed to correct and rewrite. a few people here already posted something similar: treat your own samples and loops as if someone elses, and don’t hesitate to alter and remix; but remix as if the loop was worthy of attention, because it is an idea around which you can build on.
The solution to finish tracks is to not finish them.
Produce loops and samples libraries instead. 
After about ten years of fucking about I figured out, for me at least, finishing tracks takes practice like all other aspects of music making. And even though people hate on it, getting a distrokid account and releasing tracks to spotify also helped me out. I guess you could release them to bandcamp, but spotify somehow seems more official, maybe just because most people actually use the service.
finishing tracks is easy. Finishing good tracks is hard
Once I’m in that “zone” on some new material, I often keep at it until it’s finished.
Sometimes I have to give myself a little push to get IN that zone. Like, I’ll bring in a singer or another artist that sets some expectations for delivery, or I’ll book a live show with a promise of some new music. If it’s close enough to “finished” to perform live, then the final arrangement and polish is easy.
Finishing good tracks is easy.
Getting other people to agree with my sense of ‘good’ and thereby getting them to buy my music… is HARD. 
A track is finished by the Present Me.
Until it’s revisited by the Future Me.
…who is always very critical about the Past Me.
oh damnit 