How to avoid leaving unfinished business

Imagine a soccer player who has to shoot a penalty kick, how many times does he touch the ball in an attempt to score a goal? One shot.
Imagine a tennis player. How many attempts does he make before sending the received ball into the opponent’s court? One shot.
And a volleyball player who wants to dunk into the opponent’s court to score a point, how many times does he touch the ball? One hit.

But what about us?

In the way we work – and live – we have now established diametrically opposite behaviors: our days, and the way we think, resemble pinball games in which we hit the “ball” countless times before we succeed in sending it to the target.

Let’s think about it: how many times do we come back to the same topic, how many times do we reopen the same e-mail, how many times do we re-address the same problem, how many times do we have to remember to complete a pending thing before we actually finish it?

How many attempts do we make before we start and finish that project we care about?

It seems that there is now a general lack of awareness that results in a kind of endemic resignation that leads us to consider this state of affairs normal and inevitable.
They may be considered normal, but it is also possible to change these “modern” habits, since the damage they cause far outweighs the benefits. Let’s see how.

First, we must learn to continually ask ourselves a question:

The two target numbers to aim for are zero and one.

• Target Zero: it means learning not to even once touch a good deal of things that would like to come into our lives without any benefit: junk e-mails; e-mails that are interesting to others, but not to us; e-mails that are interesting to us, but not now; requests for attention from people who really don’t interest us or to whom we don’t have to pay any attention at all; information, newspapers, books, news, gossip that don’t change our lives one iota and that don’t even make us feel good; work teams that we shouldn’t even be involved in; activities of various kinds that we find ourselves doing, but that we could have easily not done.
  
• Target One: It means learning how to play tennis in our lives. Touch once the things we have chosen to do or necessarily need to do.

We learn to reduce the number of times we read e-mails

To achieve these two targets , it is essential to drastically reduce the likelihood of coming into contact with the same things over and over again. Case in point: e-mails. If I have become accustomed to a continuous stream of reading and writing e-mails, to an almost distracted opening of the inbox, from my smartphone or computer, at every free moment that comes along, I may have become accustomed to a mechanism that is as perverse as it is unproductive.

Looking at the e-mails that came to me without observing carefully, with the intention of paying more attention to them on the next go-round and perhaps hunting for the important e-mail that may have come to me among many less important and urgent ones. Small detail: there will not be just one next go-round, but there will be many more in which we will automatically repeat these “go-rounds.”
In some of these, we will open a few e-mails and even read them. But sometimes we will respond and sometimes we won’t, proposing to do it later at another roundabout.

We end up touching e-mail many times before we decide what to do with it. In addition to wasting sacred and precious time, we enter a reactive mode and put our brains in less than ideal conditions to perform well on the task after the e-mail game, leaving them with dozens of open windows that will reappear to our attention when we least want them to.

Reducing the number of times you read e-mail–allocating only precise times of the day to this task–will force you to make decisions more quickly, and if you carve out the right amount of time at high concentration you will also make shrewder decisions. Remember also that reading e-mails should always coincide with a processing phase, and therefore the actions I recommend you take are:

1. Delete all obviously useless posts
2. Forward messages to colleagues and collaborators that you think would be of interest to them
3. Forward messages that require a colleague or coworker to complete a task related to the message received
4. Respond to the message immediately if the requested activity will take less than about 2 minutes
5. Schedule a future slot if the activity required to respond to the message is more than 2 minutes
6. Archiving messages

Remember that managing e-mail is a job, not a stress-relieving pastime.
E-mail is a very useful tool, but we have to control it, never vice versa.

In addition to e-mails, there are many other things we should get in touch with once without leaving them unsaid: decisions to be made at a meeting, action plans, readings, insights and projects to be completed, etc.
It is a matter of acquiring over time a real allergy to anything that remains incomplete. Because it will surely result in wasted time and rework that can be avoided by touch-and-go.

I leave the final task to you to think about what you would like to touch and complete on the first round of the merry-go-round, to leave as few things unfinished as possible. And if you have thought of something that seems too big to be opened and closed without having to come back to it again, remember that the important thing is to divide any task into such small portions that they can be adequately accomplished and completed in the time slot available.