How to finish your important thing
Oh, hi friends!
Thank you, Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, for calling me out, yet again.
I opened the book on Kindle again after a few friends mentioned reading and loving it. Wanted to skim and quickly reabsorb its lessons on Time Management (lol). Opened up to the chapter on “The Art of Creative Neglect” and this highlighted passage smacked me in the face.
“The second principle is to limit your work in progress. Perhaps the most appealing way to resist the truth about your finite time is to initiate a large number of projects at once; that way, you get to feel as though you’re keeping plenty of irons in the fire and making progress on all fronts. Instead, what usually ends up happening is that you make progress on no fronts—because each time a project starts to feel difficult, or frightening, or boring, you can bounce off to a different one instead. You get to preserve your sense of being in control of things, but at the cost of never finishing anything important.”
Mmm. Simple. And yet this all sounds very familiar. I was reminded lately how good finishing a project feels. You get that sense of completion. Because the hangers-on, the idling engines, they all drain your energy much more than you think.
The solution?
Burkeman advises setting a hard upper limit on the number of things you’re going to work on at one time: “The point isn’t to force yourself to finish absolutely everything you start, but rather to banish the bad habit of keeping an ever-proliferating number of half-finished projects on the back burner.”
Seems like a good way to start the week.
Pick one—creatively neglect the others—and go.
I Love Stories About Ambition…
Except, as we all know, this one featuring Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos goes…a bit…too far.
Highly recommend The Dropout on Hulu, created by Elizabeth Meriwether (of New Girl), if you want to see how a young self-made billionaire flew too close to the sun and flamed out.
Now is it bad that after watching I kind of want to invent a product?! I don't think that was their intention. (Don’t worry; I won’t.) (h/t Marissa!!)
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Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara