ACTIVITY: Unfinished Business
Make peace with your incomplete tasks, and free your mind for rest and recovery.
Do you ever find yourself lying awake at night, your mind racing with all the things you didn't get done that day? The email you meant to send, the project you wanted to start, the pile of laundry that keeps growing...
The “unfinished business” of life can nag at us. And if you’re like me, you don’t necessarily get up the next day feeling refreshed and ready to tackle it. You just keep pushing it away, and it continues to be, well, unfinished.
What to Do
At the end of each day, take 5 minutes to write down any unfinished tasks or nagging thoughts. Next to each item, note a specific next step you can take to move forward.
Important: make this step as small as possible.
For example, it could be:
Open the email you need to respond to and type the first sentence: “Thanks for your message.”
Set any notes for the project you want to start next to your desk
Put one load of laundry in the wash
Micro-steps are much easier to follow through on, especially when you’re feeling resistant to the overall task.
Then, consciously "close the book" on the day, acknowledging that you've done what you can and will be releasing the rest. That’s it! To recap:
1. Identify the unfinished business
2. Add one next micro-step
3. Move on
This ritual can help you make peace with “incompletions” and transition more easily into rest and recovery.
Oh, and remember: one way to make something go from unfinished to out of mind is to simply decide that you aren’t going to do it. Doesn’t work for everything, of course! But a general rule is that more can be left undone than we think.
How do you handle the unfinished business of life?
Before I go to sleep, I often have a short talk with my parts that we call “day in review.” It’s a narrative of how the day went from start to finish. By taking between 5 to 15 minutes to discuss how the day went, it helps me feel mastery over what I learned, mistakes I made, and things I’d like to do better in the future. I often identify extremely tiny things I can do to make my life better by combing through what annoyed me during the day.
Even though they’re super tiny, over time, the things I notice add up to make my life easier. Things as dumb as noticing that it would be better for me to pop open my side-view mirror when I’m standing outside my car, rather than getting in the car, and then having to reach over to roll down the window to pop open the side-view mirror on the passenger side. We are talking super stupid, tiny things!
By taking every minute of my life seriously, and giving myself permission to notice what annoys me, and then fix it, over time my life gets slightly easier, and it trains me to give myself permission to honor myself in the tiniest of ways.
By giving myself permission to honor these very small annoyances and fix them, I think I also train myself to honor bigger things, like when people treat me rudely. I don’t let it go. During my day in review, if parts tell me, “That person was really mean to me!“ I take it seriously, and most of the time, I find a way to terminate my interactions with that person going forward in the future. As Maya Angelou says, “When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time.“ By taking my feelings very seriously, I am able to act on them as quickly as possible, instead of denying or bargaining with the truth of what is arising in my reality field.
I love this focus on feeling “complete“ about tasks in a day, and I would add that paying attention to feeling “complete“ about what we emotionally experience during the day is also worth attending to.
For me, it is making sure I at least put something down in my bullet jounral and review it when I am away from the office. We are not writing as much as we did and that act of wiring the mind to remember more by using the writing function helps more than one might believe.
Of course, there is the issue of having the desire to do anything at all, but that is for another post I am sure.
Write it down, make it happen.