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Productivity

Give Yourself A Productivity Boost By Finishing Something

Mondays are productivity days at SimpleProductivity blog.


Photo by jayneandd

I am very good at starting projects. Not so much on bringing them to completion, especially if they involve crafts. During a recent vacation, I forced myself to take two projects that hadn’t been worked on since the previous ,with the aim of making significant progress on both of them.

I finished one of the sweaters, and I was buoyed by the boost it gave me on the other project. I thought about why this might be, and how it might apply to other projects. Here is what I came up with:

Finishing = Closure

Finishing a project allows you to take something off your task lists. You are done, and the project can be closed out, the tasks removed, and your mind allowed to leave it behind.

David Allen would call this closing a loop. And he’s right. It solves a problem, creates a solution, or finishes something outstanding.

Finishing a project brings closure to an issue.

What Does Closure Give You?

There are other things that closing a project gives you, though:

  • Satisfaction. You get the satisfaction of having completed something big. Unlike finishing a next action, a project is a series of smaller steps that has taken some time to complete.
  • Freeing Brain Cycles. Even if you weren’t aware of it, all open projects drag at your brain at some point or another. This is why we remember that we need to change the oil in the car when we are in meetings. Finishing a project frees up that bit of brain activity for something else. Or nothing else if the case may be.
  • Space To Do Something Else. I allow myself a limited number of items to be going on at a given time. Otherwise my habit of starting projects overwhelms me with all the stuff I need to do. So when I finish one project, I am able to start another. My finishing one sweater allows me to start another project I have been looking forward to.
  • Spawns Creativity. When I finish any sort of project, I notice a surge of creativity in other areas of my life. Finishing the sweater allowed me to draw up suggestions for turning a walk-in closet into a writing nook. It also gave me a boost of creativity in my writing, both blog and fiction.

These are the immediate benefits I noticed from finishing a long-outstanding project. Have you noticed benefits from finishing a project? Share below.


Photo by jayneandd