Productivity Tip #03: Start Something And Finish It

Starting something and following it through to completion provides clarity because it gets it off your mind, and a clear mind is an important element of being productive. It’s difficult to get anything done when you have twenty incomplete things pulling your mental energy in different directions.

Imagine all your next actions as blips on a radar. You don’t want to start some tasks, dawdle on a project and do half jobs on your next actions, because ultimately they will still be on your mental radar, beeping away and taking up all your time and energy. Objects won’t disappear from that radar until they are done, complete and signed off, and if you have too many incompletes distracting you, you’ll be swamped when it comes to doing the stuff that really matters.

This is why the GTD concept of a next action is critical. Next actions are small, highly manageable bite-size chunks of work. It’s very easy to start a next action and – crucially – finish it because it puts minimal demands on your time and efforts. Most importantly, the next action has a clear ending; you know what you need to do to finish it (get it off your radar). Compare that to trying to start a huge project and finishing it all in one go… it isn’t going to happen.

Productivity Tips: 10 Clever Ideas For Getting Things Done is an updated and expanded collection of the first ten posts in my popular productivity tips series and is now available to all for free.