Finishing
September 18, 2023 in goals

Do you ever feel that you have so much to work on, that you need more time in the day to finish your goals? Maybe, if you could just have a couple more hours?

Congratulations, you’re a high achiever! I could probably learn a few things from you, but today I’d like to teach you something instead.

Maybe, you can imagine a time that you finished a big project at work, on a Thursday or Friday, and nobody had another project lined up yet. I bet that you just got to slack off on Friday, or the whole team just took the day off.

Yeah, think about that feeling for a minute.

What is that feeling anyways?

Well, my hard-working friend, that is the feeling of being done. And it’s a great feeling. But I too struggle pretty often with the feeling of never-ending todo-lists and anxiety.

But how do you ever get to feel truly done when you have so much to do? The house isn’t perfectly clean, you aren’t the absolute strongest that you could possibly be, you haven’t planned every dinner. And I guarantee you’ll never be done with all of that.

So, again, how do you get the chance to feel done?

By cheating.


How to cheat your brain into feeling done?

There are a bunch of ways to do this. I think one of the best is to set a checklist at the beginning of your day. Or in the middle, who am I to judge.

Here’s a checklist that I would love to start using every day, if I only had the proper system to track it (joke, kind of):

  • Create something
  • Learn something
  • Do some kind of exercise

I often make a mental checklist like this, but I’m starting a habit of writing this down each day. Including a fill-in-the-blank for each checkbox, so that I feel the need to justify to my future self to do something actually valuable for each one… Checkboxes feel more like an affirmation of seriousness.

When finishing fails

Although the date on this article is Sept 18, 2023, it sat on my laptop in the above state for two months. I had just a little bit left to do, but kinda just forgot about it.

I’ve noticed that whenever I build up a healthy habit, the second that the habit gets broken, it is very hard for me to start back up again. It takes months of doing the thing for it to really stick. Maybe even longer.

More to come on this topic in a future article, probably.