Complete or Abandon: The Foundations of Productivity

I want you to take 10 seconds and think about this next question:

How many projects do you have lying around half-finished, waiting for you to “have time to get back to it”?

Keep thinking….

How many are there in your life?

We are in a ten-article series on the foundations of productivity. Today we will look at a fundamental productivity rule: complete or abandon.

Half-Finished Projects

OK, before we get started on this article, I want you all to know that I am in the leading position of the pack of people who have unfinished projects. I have trouble finishing things. Whether it is simply framing a piece I have created, or piling things to be scanned/entered/processed, or the nine (insert eye roll here) unfinished novels sitting on my hard drive.

There are, I have been told, people in this world that start something, work on it, and complete it before moving on to the next thing. If you are one of these rare birds, I have two things to say to you:

1. Email me so I can get your perspective and tips for a guest post. I’m not kidding. laura@lauraearnest.com.
2. Stop reading this article. It’s not for you. Really. Stop. Right now. Leave it unfinished. Oh, yeah, I forgot who I was talking to.

Anyway.

So one of the things I do four times a year is to take stock of my unfinished projects as part of my RAM dump (more on this in an upcoming article) Unfortunately the list never seems to shorten. It stays at about the same number of projects from quarter to quarter. Not necessarily the same projects, although there are many of those.

The Danger of Half-Finished Projects

The problem is that these half-finished projects are what David Allen calls Open Loops. They are not to the point where we can put them away finished, so they sit there, nagging at us when we happen to catch sight of them, or popping into our heads at inconvenient times, or invading our dreams.

Half-finished projects suck our brain power away from the things that we could be doing. Instead of focusing on one thing at a time, we have these projects pulling at our attention.

That’s a big problem if you want to be productive. Part of being productive is being able to focus on what you are doing and getting it done. How can we do that if our attention is always being pulled away?

Complete or Abandon

There is a simple-to-remember and hard-to-implement rule that can take care of this. It’s called “complete or abandon”.

If you put something aside, you must decide, before starting something else, how you will resolve the first item. You must either complete it, or abandon it.

And by abandon, I do not mean shove it in a closet somewhere with the secret intention of getting to it “some day” but rather getting rid of the project altogether. As in throwing it out. As in destroying it so it cannot be picked up again…if you choose to do it again, you must start from scratch.

It can be scary to do this, particularly if you have invested a lot of time in it.

I had a beautiful cross-stitch piece that I was about 25% done. The problem is that the fabric was impossibly small, and each stitch was a combination of single strands of three colors. The effect was glorious. The implementation was taxing and frustrating. After having put it aside for the fourth time, I took it off the stretchers and walked to the garbage can. In it went. I felt terrible at first. But then I felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. And I was able to move on to something that brought me pleasure in the execution.

Getting rid of the unfinished left room for the new.

Making A Habit

This attitude is something that can be built into our daily life. We can choose not to take on new projects until the old ones have been completed or abandoned, thus keeping our project list to a decent size. (See Curb Your Appetite For Projects)

But in order to do that, you have to start with what you have outstanding right now. You have to go through the list and evaluate, and either abandon the project, or finish it before you start something else.

Conclusion

The method is stark: complete or abandon. But you will find freedom in not having those projects distracting you from the things at hand.

Your Assignment

Your assignment from this article is to make a list of everything you have started that isn’t quite finished. Walk through your house. Look through your email. Look around your workplace. Make that list as complete as you can.

Then go through one by one and decide if you are going to complete or abandon. If abandoning, do it right then. If completing, put it on your current list and finish it as soon as you can.