Reducing Mental Effort – Part 4

Our series on reducing mental effort continues. Solve problems fully Incompletes and stress go hand-in-hand. When we’re stressed, we often want to race to the end of a project or task and call it done when it’s really 90% or 95% of the way to done. But even 99% done isn’t actually done. Some projects – like Disneyland – are never fully done because they’re ongoing and always evolving. But other projects like writing and publishing an ebook can be fully completed. And of course there’s a gray area in the middle with some projects having a reasonably well-defined completion state along with long-term maintenance activities. To the best of your abilities, try to clearly define the completion state for your projects. What is the very last action step, the completion of which marks the true finish line? When do you really get to call it over and done? When do you get to celebrate? When does your mind have permission to let go of thinking about it? If you get a project to 99% completion, your mind can’t fully let it go. Some of your mental RAM is still churning over that remaining 1%, and this can continue to be an ongoing distraction. If you possibly can, drive the rest of the project fully across the finish line, so you can really check it off as fully done. Otherwise if it’s distracting you emotionally, use the method from yesterday’s post to pre-process the distracting thoughts and feelings when they start na...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Productivity Source Type: blogs