Destressifying unfinished business
Turn on your computer, or most likely, look down at the phone in your hand and you will instantly be hit with a low level sense of anxiety about all your unfinished business.
Unopened emails, messages waiting, a palisade of browser tabs, open documents you’re halfway through, lists, folders and folders within folders within folders. Whatever screen you turn your gaze toward you are facing the gateway to your unfinished business. David Allen calls this edgeless work. We’re like digital farmers with endless acreages to till. The retina screen that brings everything sharply into focus only serves to heighten the undone feeling of what you meant to do but didn’t get done.
What to do?
There are digital tools that can help. I spend far too much time online hopping from link to link reading utterly riveting stories that urgently need my attention — especially when I have something else to do. To save myself from this habit I use Instapaper, a simple free service that saves your digital content in one place which you can access via the web or on your mobile when you finally sit down to read through all the things you’ve been meaning to read. It helps allay one variant of the modern digital disorder that makes you feel compelled to hoard every potential valuable piece of information, inspiration or mental vegetation.
The other tool I like and use a lot is Omnifocus. Its elegant integration with my Mac allows me to select anything from anywhere online (in my mail, an article, etc) and send it directly to my Omnifocus inbox. Omnifocus, for those who don’t know, is a project management software built around Getting Things Done (GTD) principles. It presumes, as I do, that everything is a project. Whether it is work related, family, home maintenance, personal, intellectual, physical or otherwise, treat it like a project. A project is a set of actions, one leading to the next in logical succession. Moving forward on any project means you take the next action and so, in true GTD form, your project comprises all the actions you need to take to get to the end of it, but with Omnifocus you use filters to see only the next action that needs to happen to make progress. By focusing only on the next actions, you get both a sense of accomplishment and make actual progress on your project.
And if you like to write, or need to write for work or by compulsion, try Scrivener, a relatively simple tool (though packed with additional features you can access depending on your style and the format you are writing for) with a wonderfully zen full screen, distraction free writing format (which I am using right now) that helps you focus exclusively on your blank white page. If you use Dropbox or some other cloud based storage service, (recommended), you can store your files there and then access the same content from any device (alas no app as of yet) which means you can write from your office, on the road, or in a café as I sometimes like to do when the silence of the home office gets too deafening.
Another essential tool I use to limit anxiety and keep the demons of unfinished business at bay is a simple timer. I use Alinof Timer but whatever you like works. I set the timer to play a banjo sound at the end of timed intervals. I used to work on 25 minute chunks (à la Pomodoro technique) but I’ve since expanded that to 45 minutes as I found 25 minutes just a little too short and I am better able to focus if I have a little more time.
My favourite tool, however, is nothing more than paper and pen. I use a small black book that fits in my pocket for on-the-fly observations, idea capture and jotting down pretty much anything useful or interesting that I pops into my head, and a big black book on my desk for planning my days and week. It is here I mark off my daily to dos, keep track of the things that pop up unexpectedly, track the things I am trying to do daily (like meditate, write) and make note of what comes from phone calls and other interactions that require some action from me.
I use the back pages periodically to do massive brain dumps in which I consciously attempt to literally vacate my mind of every single thing I am thinking of, regardless of context or priority. I’ll have a client deliverable sitting right atop a task like “grease that annoying squeaky door” or “recaulk bathroom sink”. A brain dump is a highly satisfying and useful habit. It allows you to fully discharge all the tiny and not so tiny “things” you are carrying around in your head. Every thought, undone action, want-to-do item, big goal, small task, has psychic weight to it. Until you put them down on paper (or into a digital format if you prefer) they will stay inside you and they will tax your mental energy just like an app refreshing in the background drains your phone battery. I don’t attempt to organize this list or do anything with it but lay it all out. Only once I am exhausted and really can’t think of a single other thing that is on or deeply buried within my mind do I then review the list. I copy out and transfer any immediately actionable items to a current to do list, and then just leave the sheet alone until my next review.
Review regularly
Taking stock regularly is the other thing I do to keep on track and to not feel undone by too many lingering unfinished projects. Every week (ideally) and at least once a month, in tandem with doing a brain dump, I review where I am at with the projects I am working on. This entails both reviewing past brain dumps (and often very satisfyingly being able to check off lots of items from the list) and also checking the pulse of where I am at on the three or four major projects / big goals I’ve set for myself for the year. I like doing these reviews regularly rather than waiting for big year end reviews which is when most people do it, because it makes me feel like I still have time to catch up if I’ve fallen behind, or to re-evaluate if the goal or project still makes sense. Priorities can shift and sometimes doing something teaches you that in fact, you’d rather be doing something else. Sometimes that’s called quitting and needs to be avoided, but sometimes it’s called learning. It can be hard to know which is which, but in the end, you really can’t work on too many things at once and regular reviews shows you what and where you are putting your energy , what you are neglecting, and gives you the opportunity to evaluate whether that’s because you no longer care about the project (in which case it’s time to drop it altogether) or you do (in which case it’s time to allocate some time and energy to it), or you do but don’t have time for it now (in which case you can park it in your Someday file).
All of that takes care of the doing part of managing unfinished business, but there are also mental and physical habits that form an essential part of the regime to help you sustain it. Meditation is one. Meditation seems to confound many people as it did me for several years until I finally decided to just try it for two minutes a day (on the advice of a wonderful writer and human being, Leo Babauta). Sitting down in a comfortable position with a straight back and breathing really wasn’t that hard to understand, once I finally tried to do it. Yes, the mind races, hopping from thought to thought (the monkey brain), and no, I don’t know how to levitate, but at the very core of meditation, from what I have learned and felt, making a regular habit of pressing the pause button on your mind is surprisingly refreshing and powerful. Very brief meditations can have deep, lasting effects and since all you need is to be still and breathe, it is the most highly portable and flexible tool for keeping sane and calming the mind I have ever experienced.
Physical exercise too is essential. As in meditation, physical activity unlocks the mind in ways nothing else can. It releases biochemicals, endorphins and like meditation, removes your focus from the (many) things and projects causing you worry to the more urgent and present moment full of sensations of physicality. Your muscles hurt, you sweat, you breathe heavily. All of this sucks you right into the present moment where anxiety has no purchase. Your unfinished business lies behind you and ahead of you, but when you are in the moment and focused on doing whatever form of exercise you choose, you are nowhere else and this is good for your mind and creativity as much as it is for your health and longevity.
Baked into both practices is discipline, which lies at the core of getting anything done, but these actions and habits help build your discipline as you devote attention to them, providing a kind of virtuous circle of energy you can draw on to keep going.
Go for a walk
Taking walks is for me is a kind of combination of meditation and exercise. The longer the walk the better and though solitary walks are pleasurable, nothing beats having a good hiking companion to make the miles disappear and of course, to let the conversation flow and usually share a pint or two with at the end of the journey.
Because, while getting things done and moving on your projects is often the main thing people are preoccupied with, life’s best moments are those with whom we’ve shared and felt a kinship — mentally, spiritually, emotionally, physically. Walking, talking, drinking and eating with friends and good companions is, in my humble opinion, perhaps the pinnacle of good feeling that human life can afford. Making the time for these things in your life is as important for you to complete your work, if not more, than all the world’s greatest productivity tools and expert advice.
After all, you are unfinished business, until you’re not. Learn to enjoy the doing as much as the getting done and you will find you not only get much more done, but that it feels less like work and more like living.
