Mastering the Art of Unfinished Business
Learn to strategically abandon obligations, escape burnout, and focus on what truly matters.
Drowning in to-dos?
Don't finish them.
A task is just a checkbox with some text.
What you do with it, is your decision. Most of us forget about that second part.
In a world obsessed with completion, the art of not finishing things might just be your superpower.
Everybody agrees that we live in a time of information overload. A problem that is only accelerating with the advent of AI.
What most of us don't see:
We also live in a time of task overload.
Consciously or not, we transform many of the information bits into tasks.
Thousands of mails and messages are implicetely or explicetly, directly or indirectly demanding action.
Emails, messages, posts, tweets, chapters, audiobooks, podcasts, video bits.
You stress out. You are feeling overwhelmed and anxious.
Like a golddigger you are trying to weed out useful nuggets of the constant stream of information. And your brain is extremely good at that. But increase the inflow of information and you also increase the percentage of valuable nuggets.
Whether they linger in the back of your mind, scatter your notes or amount to giant lists and sublists in your task manager doesn't matter.
Some of these are actual "needs", some more are "wants" and a big part are "shoulds".
On the surface they all appear the same: that they have to be taken care of.
The problem are not so much the "needs" and "wants". There are established systems like the Eisenhower-Matrix and others, that I talk about in my planning system.
The biggest problem sits with the "shoulds". We generate a shitload of "should" tasks in the back of our minds. All things you think you should do to optimize your health, your life, your work, your relationship, your parenting, you name it.
But should you really?
To make things worse, all this information and all of these tasks, live now in a cloud and follow you everywhere you go - there is no escape. There is no more "haven't seen it", "couldn't see it".
The average white collar worker receives around 120 emails per day, and sends around 40 with around 3h each day spent with mails on average.
I get around 200 emails per day. Just work related. One piling up on the other leaving me with that nagging feeling of always being behind.
This does only include mail correspondence but not subsequent task creation and action.
Add an average of 50 messages and 40 notifications to the mix, plus between 3 to 5 hours of average social media and video consumption - and you end up with a tsunami of information and subsequent automatic "task" creation.
Between 70-80% of employees have reported at least temporary burn-out symptoms, whereas it was "only" about 40% in 2015. 30-40% of adults globally experience sleep disorders.
This is crazy. Burn-out has massive consequences for your personal and professional life, with a high toll on your relationships and your overall wellbeing.
We all have only 24h.
It is technically and mathematically impossible to handle of that information AND task load on a daily basis.
If you seriously try, you will go insane, you will burn out.
There is many layers to this challenge.
There is the obvious one of regulating information and task inflow.
There is the next one of prioritizing and implementation strategies.
There has been written plentiful about these topics.
But that is not what I want to talk about today.
What I want to address today is your core attitude of handling this situation. Your world view, your self view, your morals that shape your reaction to these challenges.
Perfectionism is a disease.
Good enough, most often is good enough.
But to say it clearly, this should not be a free ticket to mediocrity. On the contrary.
There is some business that definitely needs finishing, without any question.
I am surgeon, I should not finish half way into a surgery. And I will write more about what surgery can teach you about planning, execution, persistence and grit.
But most people are not surgeons. And most things are not surgeries.
But if you think of yourself as a brain surgeon and treat everything like a brain surgery, you will burn out.
You have to realize that you can't do everything you want to do. You can't do everything of what others want you to do.
And you shouldn't.
At least not all now.
Develop razors or rules for yourself.
Such as 80/20 where you focus on the 20% of tasks that bring 80% of the results.
Conscious "stop doing" list, where you define, what you are not going to do anymore.
The "good enough" mindset for lower important tasks.
You have to learn to sit and breath through a reality guided by impossibilities.
You have to learn to give yourself permission to fall behind the high standards you set for yourself.
It is ok to have high standards. It is necessary to have high standards. But not in every area at once.
One key insight I learned from a colleague:
Just because YOU yourself wrote it down as task doesn't mean you actually have to do it.
I had started to learn 9 languages. I discontinued 4.
I had started to learn 7 different instruments, I discontinued 5.
Just because someone else is asking you to do something, doesn't mean you actually have to do it.
Just because you started a book, doesn't mean you have to finish it.
This is the art of unfinished business.
Give yourself permission to stop. To not do things or not keep doing things.
Things fall through the cracks. You don't answer that mail. You don't follow up on something. You can't make it to an appointment.
It has nothing to do with how good you are as a person. These mental images and moral definitions of a idealised self are what is causing you distress.
You are not a robot, you are a human being.
The age of the man-machine-fusion comes soon enough, until then give yourself a break.
It is not that you wouldn't care anymore.
It is about you being okay with the moment. Learn to live with temporary disharmony.
One of my favorite quotes and that I got for my wedding is:
You can have everything in life as long as you accept that it looks different than you think.
Identify ONE "should" task that you can let go of and post it here or reply.
To more in life,
Nicco
Liste to the song version of this post here: