Not Quite Finished
If you’re anything like me, you have your share of “not quite finished” tasks and projects. That’s OK to a certain extent, but sometimes our lives get so littered with “not quite finished” that we can barely focus on what’s important.
It may be a Master’s degree that’s one paper short of completion. But it’s been one paper short of completion for three years. Perhaps it’s a kid’s bedroom that’s been all prepped for painting for six months, or maybe a gym membership allowed to lapse after the first week’s enthusiasm. Heck, it might even be Norm’s book “The Alignment Doctrine”. In all these things, “close” doesn’t count. They’re done, or they’re not.
In the natural course of life, there will always be a few jobs in the hopper. But in a world that assures us that happiness is just one more self-improvement away, we find ourselves in a multitasking blizzard of partially-finished projects, most of which will never see completion. No wonder we’re lost, tired and frustrated.
The sad thing about “not quite finished” is that we’ve invested precious time, money, and energy. Understandably, we want to get some return on the investment, so we keep dreaming about completion and reward. Someday. This is the Sunk Cost Fallacy (https://mailchi.mp/4585150c2ce5/resolution-for-2850441?e=[UNIQID]) , of which I wrote earlier.
The “not quite finished” habit is a sneaky habit. I know it all too well, and you probably do, too. It’s not like a big, bad cocaine habit, it’s more like having a hundred little habits each of which is 1% of a cocaine habit. At the end of our lives, though, it really doesn’t matter which habits wasted our time, money, energy, and opportunities.
There are really only two things to do about the “not quite finished” habit. The first and best is to not start things in the first place unless there is a firm commitment of time, energy, and resources and a realistic plan to complete. Accountability is useful in this regard.
But for most of us, even with the best of planning, commitment, and accountability, these darned things occasionally sneak out of control. Other valid and vital commitments get in the way, and the next thing you know, you’ve got a “not quite finished” project sulking in the corner. Maybe two. Maybe five.
The way to deal with existing out-of-control “not quite finished” projects is to triage them. We begin this by writing down each and every thing that we have underway in our personal life and our professional life. No need to be fancy– jot them down with no particular order or priority. Just collect them. Show the list to friends and family, and they’ll likely add items we overlooked.
Once we have collected these vagrants, we triage them as follows:
1. Items that have no more than nostalgic value should be pushed off the cliff. Just because we once loved them, if they really aren’t going to see the light of day in five lifetimes, scratch them off the list and forget they were ever there. In general terms, look to knock off a third to a half of the list. (If you find yourself moaning about all the time, effort, and money you’ve already spent, you aren’t paying attention to theconcept of Sunk Costs (https://mailchi.mp/4585150c2ce5/resolution-for-2850441?e=[UNIQID]) .)
2. Items that may still have real value in your life, but aren’t about to yield significant benefit, and which you’d like to tackle if somebody gave you an eighth day in each week and a few extra dollars, can be allowed to live, but only on the “Maybe/Someday” list which you will review and re-triage a couple of times per year. In the meantime, as they say in New York, fuhgeddaboutit.
3. Only items which will yield significant value should remain on the active projects list, and only if one can actually write out a timeline and allocate money and energy. This will be a very short list, probably ten or fewer items. The test question is this: “Will tackling and completing this make my life better within a reasonable timeframe?”