Take Control of Your Incompletes

"Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week." - Spanish proverb

Temporary Blindness

Do you have things on your action list that linger in a state of incompletion for weeks or even months? Sometimes if we look at the same thing enough times, we don't see it anymore. When it comes to managing our time, this is a blindness none of us can afford.

When is the last time you took a close look at your priorities? Most of us do things that we don't really need to, while leaving things that are important undone. We choose easier tasks or tasks that interest us. Sometimes the tasks that are difficult and outside of our comfort zone are absolutely essential to our ongoing success.

The Cure

What if you committed to taking care of the incompletes in your life? You'd have a clearer vision of your priorities and free yourself from the nagging feeling of loose ends. It sounds too simple to be true and yet it is.

Cleaning Up

One of the principles in a course that we teach is "Clean up your messes." As part of our learning, we made a commitment to do just that. We listed all of our incomplete projects and identified what it would take to clean them up.

Most of us probably have items on our to-do list that are not inherently interesting, but if addressed, could improve our lives. For us, it was cleaning out a storage unit, a task we'd been meaning to take care of for quite a while.

We have a monthly rental storage space and it was filled with boxes. You know how it is with boxes? They can contain all sorts of things. Quite a few of ours were filled with stuff we never use. We went through each box and selected things we could give away.

Anything we thought we would use within the next 30 days, we kept. Guess what? There weren't many things that we needed to keep. In fact, we were able to cancel the storage unit rental, saving ourselves $100.00 a month.

Refocus on What Matters

Once we'd been through our incomplete projects, we started a new list of goals. This is the key benefit of taking care of things. Afterwards, our vision is fresh and we are free to do new things.

The results in our life were nothing short of wonderful. We added the goal of renting a small piece of land in a wooded area where we could go to relax on weekends during the summer and get away from the big city.

Taking care of our incompletes gave us the momentum we needed to put this dream into action. We now enjoy the piece of property with a small cottage on it, which we truly relish. It is delightful to watch nature come alive right in our backyard.

4 Powerful Tips for Time Management

One of the most valuable resources any of us have is our time. Taking care of incompletes is a powerful step towards using your time well.

Here are four more tips for enhancing your time management:

1. Observe how you are currently spending your time. For a couple of weeks, keep a running log of your activities. Plans are one thing. Reality can be something different.
2. Review your priorities. We all benefit from taking the time every week to consider our priorities and adjust our plans accordingly.
3. Assign a time limit to each task. If you want to avoid having to clean up incomplete projects, set a time limit. This will bring you to the revisioning stage sooner. Imagine what you might accomplish by doing that.
4. Learn to say No. When you understand your priorities, it is easier to know where you should spend your time. None of us can do everything people ask of us.

"The bad news is time flies. The good news is you're the pilot." - Michael Altshuler

Call to Action:

1. Look at your incompletes and develop an action plan for cleaning them up. Make sure that you set a deadline.
2. For the next two weeks, keep a log of how you spend your time. Analyze the log. What are you focusing on? What are leaving undone?

Your Friends,
The UpCloseTeam