How unfinished tasks inhibit you and what you can do about them

It’s like you’re going through life with your handbrake on.

You don’t know what it is, but something is preventing you from working full steam ahead on your current project. Your thoughts are always wandering, and an inner restlessness does not let you go.

Unfinished projects are energy vampires. Get them off your back!

With unfinished tasks, there is a big problem — you can consciously ignore them for a while, but in the subconscious, they are always present and consume your valuable mental energy.

The unfinished things in our lives

You might be surprised if I don’t talk about the big things here. It’s not about the company you haven’t founded yet or the book you haven’t written yet. You may have already started such big projects, and you’re not making much progress, but they’re not what’s damaging your subconscious.

This is about the thousand little things that swallow up the energy you need to realize your big projects.

So what are we talking about here?

We’re talking about the unfinished tax return, the bike that’s been broken for months in the garage and the pending call to your parents to find out how they’re doing.

We talk about all the annoying little things that we put off day after day because we hope to find more motivation to do them on another day.

But this day will never come. The motivation to do these little things does not increase. But the bad conscience is getting bigger every day. For a long time this bad conscience only gnaws at us unconsciously, but one day it rises to the surface and suddenly seems so overwhelmingly important that we can no longer ignore it.

Let’s be honest: Every one of us postpones things every day that don’t seem particularly urgent to us. We can still deal with them later — perhaps when they suddenly become urgent one day. That would still be soon enough.

But here we make a fatal mistake: these unfinished tasks do not only affect our lives when they have become so urgent that we can no longer ignore them, but long before.

In fact, they rob us of mental energy as soon as we have repressed and postponed them.

Problem-Solving Step 1: Inventory and Sorting

You only solve a problem if you know exactly what it is. In the case of the small, unfinished tasks that we carry around with us in our subconscious,

we usually don’t know the true extent of the problem.

My advice is, therefore: sit down with pen and paper and write down all the small unfinished tasks that occur to you. Calls you should make, things you want to get or throw away, repairs in the house that have to be done, and so on.

Then you get up and walk through your apartment or house. On this tour, you will surely come up with other things you didn’t think of while sitting.

Next, take a look at your schedule. There you can also find hints for small tasks that you have been pushing too long.

Take as much time as you need for this inventory. Don’t stop until you can’t think of anything else with the best will in the world. Only now do you move on to sorting.

Have a look at the list you have written. Write after each entry how long you think it will take to complete.

The call with your parents you can set to the example with twenty minutes (I do not know your parents.) You will know best how long you call on average). The repair of the bike may take one hour and the tax return two hours.

Little by little, you assign an estimated time to each item on your list. Then you write them all down again on a new sheet of paper, but this time sorted by duration, starting with the quickest tasks to complete.

At the top of your list would be something like changing the light bulb in the bathroom and at the bottom the tax return.

Problem-solving Step 2: Scheduling tasks

Next, pick up your calendar.

Any task longer than five minutes can be entered into the calendar within a week. That way, you’ll be sure to eliminate all your energy guzzlers within seven days.

Having something on your calendar as an appointment has a much better chance of getting it done than just keeping it in your head. Ignoring something in writing is much harder than forgetting an occasional thought.

You cross out every registered task on your piece of paper. In the end, there are only those left that take up to five minutes to complete.

These smallest tasks are now completed immediately in the order in which you wrote them down. There’s simply no reason to move jobs any further into the future if you can complete them in just five minutes.

So at the end of this step, you have a clear plan for the next seven days and already some items from your list completely done.

Problem-solving Step 3: Complete Tasks

This last step is no longer difficult. For the next seven days, you’ll take your calendar at the same time every day and complete the tasks you’ve entered for that day.

The first commandment is that you do not postpone any of these tasks until a later day, because the time of postponement is over.

Every evening you now go to bed with the good feeling that you have made your life a bit easier. Every morning you notice how your balance returns and your inner restlessness diminishes.

At the end of the seven days, there is finally none of the old tasks left that have robbed you of your energy for weeks and months. At last, you have the strength to devote all your energy to your high goals and projects.

Problem-solving and step 4: Establish a system for the future

Even if you have finished your little unfinished tasks now — new ones will come. But this time you don’t want to collect them again until the mountain of unfinished things has grown so big that it will kill you.

Get used to doing everything in the future that takes less than five minutes immediately and enter all other everyday tasks in your calendar from now on and complete them within the next seven days.

Conclusion

If you apply these four steps, you will find that the thousand little things that have robbed you of your energy so far are not really a big deal. It’s possible to do them all without wasting a lot of power and strength.

At the same time, you will collect a lot of experiences of success in a concise time, which will motivate you to integrate this practice into your everyday life from now on.

Ultimately, all of this is about generating momentum. If we manage to get into motion, it will be easier to stay in motion over time. What’s more, you will find that over time, it becomes harder and harder to stop you.

Start with the small things to make the big ones possible. Because if you don’t take care of the little things, you will never manage the big projects.

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