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 things pulling your mental energy in different directions. Imagine all your next actions as blips on a radar. You don’t want to start a bunch of tasks, dawdle on a project and do half jobs on your next actions, because ultimately they will still be on your mental radar taking up all your time and energy and being a major distraction. Objects won’t disappear from that radar until they are done, wound up and signed off.

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Let me briefly describe a day I had not too long ago. I woke up, had a wash and got dressed. I updated my blogs, then did some idle browsing of my bookmarks. On my next actions list I had to pay a bill, fill in a form and clean the home. However I kept putting it off. I’d find something else to do, watch a little TV, play on my Nintendo Wii. Before I knew it, it was the evening and I decided to move those crappy little tasks to the next day. Then I moved them to the day after that. By the latter stages of the week, all those tasks had been pushed back so far and had built up so much, that they came crashing down on top of me and I ended up doing very little at all.

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I’m sure a lot of you will be able to relate with me when I say that since I jumped on the productivity bandwagon, I’ve picked up lots of random little tips from my own experiences and reading other blogs. It’s not practical to just bring them all together into one big mash-up of an article, so I thought I would start a new series of posts introducing and discussing each individual tip. Hope you get some new ideas of it

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