Start Finishing

1. Stop Starting, Start Finishing Projects That Matter

We don’t do ideas; we do projects.

Ideas remain dormant. Many people have brilliant ideas buried away, waiting for a "someday" that never arrives. Starting new things only adds to this pile of unfinished potential, leading to creative constipation and dissatisfaction. The key isn't more ideas or more starts, but converting those ideas into tangible projects.

Projects require action. A project is defined as anything that demands time, energy, and attention to complete, whether personal or professional. Recognizing everything from organizing a closet to starting a business as a project helps you see where your limited resources are actually going and where they need to go to enable you to thrive. We thrive by doing our best work, and best work is always expressed through finished projects.

Best work is unique. Your best work is something only you can do, leveraging your unique experiences and skills. It serves both you and others, pushing you to the edge of your capabilities and comfort zone. This inherent challenge is why it's easily displaced by easier tasks, making the focus on finishing crucial for a meaningful life.

2. Overcome the "Air Sandwich" Blocking Your Best Work

In between the two slices of bread are actually five different challenges that combine to keep us from spending our days working on what matters most.

The gap exists. Many people experience a frustrating gap between their big-picture vision and their day-to-day reality, like an "air sandwich." This isn't empty space but is filled with specific challenges preventing progress on what matters most. Identifying these challenges is the first step to bridging the gap.

Five core challenges: The air sandwich is filled by:

• Competing priorities (ours and others')
• Head trash (self-limiting beliefs)
• No realistic plan (or confusing ideas for plans)
• Too few resources (or not seeing/using what you have)
• Poor team alignment (not communicating needs to your support system)

Challenges work together. These obstacles rarely appear in isolation; they work in concert, making simple solutions ineffective. Addressing one challenge, like creating a realistic plan, often requires tackling others simultaneously, such as confronting head trash about your planning ability or aligning your team.

3. Cultivate the Five Keys: Intention, Awareness, Boundaries, Courage, Discipline

The core keys to unlocking our best work include: Intention, Awareness, Boundaries, Courage, Discipline.

Virtues for thriving. Overcoming the air sandwich and doing your best work requires cultivating specific practices, synthesized here as five key virtues. These are not innate talents but practiced behaviors that can be developed, helping you navigate challenges and stay on course.

Keys unlock potential:

• Intention: Setting clear goals and purposes for your time and energy.
• Awareness: Knowing yourself, your energy levels, and recognizing obstacles.
• Boundaries: Creating space for your work and space from distractions and others' demands.
• Courage: Taking action despite fear, especially when facing uncertainty or sharing your work.
• Discipline: Sticking to the plan and doing the work, even when you don't feel like it, creating freedom.

Practice makes progress. You likely under- or over-cultivate certain keys. Recognizing which keys you need to practice more is crucial. Discipline, often misunderstood as punishment, actually creates freedom by enabling you to consistently do what matters most, leading to happiness and success.

4. Embrace Thrashing and Let Go of Ideas That Don't Matter

The more an idea matters to you, the more you’ll thrash, precisely because its success or failure is deeply important to you.

Thrashing is a sign. Thrashing is the emotional flailing and metawork you do around an idea without making real progress. It's not laziness but a sign the idea matters deeply, triggering fears and head trash. You might thrash before, during, or at the end of a project.

Creative constipation hurts. Avoiding your best work leads to creative constipation, a toxic state where you're full of ideas but can't push them out. This energy turns destructive, leading to resentment, diminished joy, and self-sabotage. Channeling this energy into creation is vital for thriving.

Letting go is necessary. You're likely carrying too many ideas and projects, displacing your best work. To trade up to what matters most, you must consciously let go of less important ideas, even if it feels uncomfortable. This frees up energy and focus for the projects you choose to finish.

5. Convert Ideas into SMART Goals and Choose Your Success Level

To get to the place our soul longs to be, we’re going to have to convert our ideas into doable projects at the same time that we’re going to have to get real about all the projects we are doing.

Ideas need structure. An idea is formless; a goal provides direction. Converting your chosen idea into a SMART goal makes it tangible and actionable. SMART stands for Simple, Meaningful, Actionable, Realistic, and Trackable.

SMART goal components:

• Simple: Easy to understand without ambiguity.
• Meaningful: Connects to your deeper purpose or values.
• Actionable: Clearly indicates what steps to take (often starts with a verb).
• Realistic: Achievable with available resources and constraints.
• Trackable: Progress can be measured, quantitatively or qualitatively.

Levels of success. Success isn't binary (pass/fail); it has levels: Small (minimum to pass), Moderate (exceeds minimum, achievable alone), and Epic (greatly exceeds, requires a team). Choosing a realistic level of success aligns expectations with effort and resources, preventing overwhelm and disappointment.

6. Build and Activate Your Success Pack for Support

Your success pack is the group of people who are going to be instrumentally involved in helping you push your best-work project to done.

You can't do it alone. Finishing significant projects, especially epic ones, requires support. Your success pack is your team, providing fuel and diverse perspectives. Focusing on these "yaysayers" helps counteract the disproportionate weight we give to naysayers.

Four kinds of support:

• Guides: More experienced people you look up to (living or historical).
• Peers: People at a similar level who can provide reciprocal support and challenge you.
• Supporters: People doing work with and for you (e.g., partner, sitter, assistant).
• Beneficiaries: Specific people who will benefit from your finished work.

Activate your team. Building the pack is just the start; you must actively use it. List specific people, brainstorm how they can help (and you can help them), determine communication frequency, and proactively communicate progress and needs. This makes the project real and creates accountability.

7. Make Space for Your Project Using the Project Pyramid and Five Projects Rule

You don’t find time and space for your best work—you make time and space for it.

Time must be made. You won't magically find time for your best work; you must intentionally create it. This involves rethinking how you view and use time, treating it as space to be filled with purposeful activity. Chunking, linking, and sequencing are essential skills for this.

The Project Pyramid: Projects break down into smaller chunks across different timescales (year, quarter, month, week, block, task). One large project spawns many smaller tasks. Understanding this hierarchy reveals why overcommitting is common – you're trying to fit too many large projects into limited time, leading to overwhelm.

The Five Projects Rule: Limit yourself to no more than five active projects per timescale (though three is often more realistic for creative/professional work). This constraint forces prioritization and makes planning manageable. It helps overcome the challenges of having no realistic plan and too few resources by focusing your limited capacity.

8. Optimize Your Environment and Timing for Focused Work

Make sure your environment is working for you.

Environment matters. Your physical environment significantly impacts your focus, momentum, and creativity. Factors like sound, smell, sunlight, clothing, clutter, and space influence your ability to do deep work. Identify what works best for you and actively shape your surroundings.

Batching and stacking: Increase efficiency by:

• Batching: Doing similar tasks together (e.g., processing emails in one block).
• Stacking: Doing compatible dissimilar tasks simultaneously (e.g., listening to a podcast while exercising).

Timing is personal. Don't force yourself into a schedule that doesn't match your natural chronotype (lark, emu, owl). Identify your peak energy times for different types of work (focus, social, admin) and build your schedule around them. Mondays and Tuesdays are often best for deep work, while later in the week suits collaborative or lighter tasks.

9. Build Daily Momentum with Routines and the 5/10/15 Split

How we spend our days is, of course, how we live our lives.

Days build a life. Thriving is built day by day through purposeful action. Daily momentum is crucial because days are where distractions and challenges derail progress. Each step, no matter how small, creates a different path for tomorrow.

Defaults reduce friction. Habits (single behaviors) and routines (sequences of habits) are powerful defaults that reduce decision fatigue and conserve energy. Create routines for morning, bedtime, work warm-up/checkout, and transitions. Use anchors (environments, tools) to trigger desired habits.

The 5/10/15 Split: A simple daily planning method:

• 5: Focus on your Five Projects (for the week/day).
• 10: Spend 10 minutes in the morning checking your plan and identifying the first task.
• 15: Spend 15 minutes in the evening reviewing accomplishments, noting unfinished tasks, and planning for tomorrow.

This split helps you start strong, disengage effectively, and maintain momentum without overplanning too far in advance.

10. Account for Drag Points: No-Win Scenarios, OPP, Derailers, and Naysayers

Reality will push against the design of your project road map.

Drag slows progress. Just like vehicles face drag, your projects will encounter resistance. This drag often comes from people, including yourself. Identifying these drag points allows you to plan for them and mitigate their impact.

Internal drag: No-win scenarios you tell yourself:

• Success will wreck relationships.
• Success requires sacrificing virtue.
• You won't be able to replicate success ("What if I can't do it again?").
  These beliefs lead to choosing mediocrity as a "safe" play.

External drag:

• OPP (Other People's Priorities): Demands and expectations from others that conflict with your project. Address by creating space, saying no, or weaving them into your project.
• Derailers: Well-meaning people whose "help" throws you off course. Manage by setting boundaries and requesting specific feedback.
• Naysayers: People actively against you or your project. Avoid engaging; focus energy on your success pack instead.

Premortem planning. Conduct a project premortem by asking how the project might fail. This helps identify potential drag points (no-wins, OPP, derailers, naysayers, overcommitment, head trash) so you can proactively plan to prevent or address them.

11. Get Unstuck by Addressing Cascades, Logjams, and Tarpits

Projects get off track, and the more a project gets off track, the more likely it is to end up stuck.

Projects stall. Even with planning, projects can get stuck. Recognizing the type of stuckness helps you apply the right solution.

Types of stuck projects:

• Cascades: One project falling behind causes others to fall behind. Solution: Stop taking on new projects, prioritize essential ones, and work sequentially using the snowball method.
• Logjams: Too many parallel projects with simultaneous deadlines. Solution: Review conflicting chunks, triage projects, and renegotiate deadlines.
• Tarpits: Projects that get harder to pick up the longer they're stuck. Solution: Confirm it's not dead, reconnect with the pain of inaction, chunk smaller, and work on it at least twice a week.

Preventing stuckness. Many stuck projects result from overcommitment or misalignment with priorities. Regularly reviewing your Five Projects and capacity helps prevent these issues. Getting unstuck requires finishing essential projects and committing to fewer in the future.

12. Finish Strong, Run a Victory Lap, and Conduct After-Action Reviews

Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.

Finishing transforms. Crossing the finish line on a best-work project is exhilarating and transformative. You become a different person through the act of creation. Don't rush to the next thing; acknowledge the journey and the accomplishment.

Celebrate success. Run a victory lap to acknowledge your achievement and be seen for it. This isn't bragging but a vital part of the process. Celebrate small wins daily to build momentum and make big finishes feel earned.

Transition and review. Create transition time and space between projects to avoid burnout. Conduct an after-action review (AAR) to learn from the project:

• What was supposed to happen?
• What actually happened?
• What went well?
• What could be improved?
• What will you do differently next time?

Unlock new doors. Finishing a project unlocks new possibilities, skills, relationships, and confidence. It proves you can do what you set out to do, fueling future best work.

Last updated: June 30, 2025