I am not a strong finisher. The final hurdle in any given task has always been the hardest for me, which may explain why I haven’t updated this blog since July. It’s not that I haven’t been writing posts – I have a heap of them in the drafts folder – it’s just that I haven’t been finishing posts.
And it’s not just blog posts – I have so many unfinished projects kicking round that I’ve lost count of them. The table I was up-cycling, the jewellery that I intend to fix one day, the sewing pile that isn’t getting any smaller… the list goes on. It’s a miracle that I even ever manage to finish a song… but who knows how many scraps of lyrics I have in various box files and folders in my studio.
I constantly write lists, and although they help, I often find myself procrastinating or doing something that isn’t even on the list but somehow seems more important right now (wait, that’s still procrastinating, isn’t it?). Even if I set myself deadlines, they are usually ignored if they are self-imposed and not dictated by something outside my control.
So what do I do? Is it beyond the realm of possibility to hope that I can change my ways?
To try to give myself (and you) a helping hand, here’s a few interesting posts on the subject:
- How To Finish What You Started – Positivity Blog
- How to Make your To Do List Doable – Life Hacker
- How to Stay Focused and Complete Tasks – About.com
It seems the most common problem is to make your goals too vague, leaving you feeling like you don’t know where to start, let alone finish. This sounds very, very familiar to me, so my first task is to break down my to do lists into more manageable chunks – I may not be able to tick off ‘sort out kitchen’ but I am much more likely to complete the task if I put ‘wash dishes’ and ‘wipe down kitchen surfaces’, for example. I’m going to give this a try, and to apply a few more tips from the articles above – we’ll see if it makes things easier.
Do you have any tips for getting through your to do lists? What makes you feel productive? Let me know in the comments!
Ells' Blog 