Even when you take the time to set clear goals....

........visualize success, and break big goals down into projects and action steps, it can be difficult to get yourself to take action consistently until your goal is 100% complete.

Crossing the starting line is much easier than crossing the finish line.

Your overall results in life largely depend on your ability to follow through until you achieve completion. Many projects produce essentially zero results if they’re 90% complete. Anything less than 100% complete means they are just work-in-progress (WIP) and all of us accountants know the problems associated with WIP. The key results only appear when you reach 100% completion.

For example, if I write 90% of an article and don’t publish it, it produces no value. The value cannot be delivered until the article is 100% complete and published.

Work in progress

Work in progress can produce feelings like dissatisfaction, discomfort, stress, worry, shame, and regret. We worry that we may have wasted too much time and energy on such projects with little to show for our efforts.

One way to avoid too many work in the stage of WIP, is to give more careful thought to which particular projects you’re willing to accept in the first place. Having too many active projects at the same time makes it hard to complete them. It’s like trying to juggle too many balls at once. You end up dropping every ball.

Variety

One reason we take on too many projects is the desire for variety. Working on the same project day after day can get boring. Another reason is that projects tend to be easier and more motivating in the beginning. Starting a new project is often fun. It’s much more difficult to work through the project and see it through to completion.

Learning Your Lessons

In order to move forward into a better place of achievement, we first need to absorb the lessons from WIP. If you’re carrying around some psychological baggage from past WIP, then take a moment to forgive yourself for those mistakes. You screwed up. It’s okay. You’re human.

At the same time, it’s wise to allow a little of that regret from past WIP to hang around. That feeling serves as an on-going warning that we don’t want to get into similar situations again.

The feeling of regret has a positive message, encouraging you to avoid starting too many projects if you won’t complete them.

Instead of trying to drug this negative feeling with excess food or drink, turn towards it. Give it your full attention for a moment, and listen to what it has to say. Ask yourself, What lessons can I learn from my piled up WIP? How can all these unfinished projects make me stronger?

You might come up with a statement like: “I’m tired of wasting time on projects that never go anywhere. Obviously I’m only going to get results if I complete something. So before I set any new goals or tackle any new projects, I’d better be sure I’m going to finish them”.

Abandoning Failed Strategies

Notice which strategies you’ve already tried to get yourself to take action consistently. If you’ve tried something a few times, and it has never worked, stop doing it. Quite often people get into circular patterns where they keep trying the same failed strategies every few years, hoping that somehow things will be different. That doesn’t work.
What are your failed strategies? Are you willing to drop them, so you can free your mind to figure out something more intelligent that might actually work?

Accepting the Difficult Work

Worthwhile projects don’t normally complete themselves. A good project will frequently require a serious investment of time and energy. Even if the work is enjoyable, you may still need to put in many hours to see it through to the end.

Almost every meaningful project will include some unpleasant or difficult tasks. You are not going to enjoy those tasks, but they’re essential for the project’s completion.

You have the option of only doing what’s easy, but if you stick with what’s easy all the time, most of your projects will be pretty low on the value scale. Even if you complete them, they aren’t going to make much of a difference.

If you wish to stop having so many incompletes and see more of your projects through to completion, you must accept that certain tasks will be difficult and to decide to do them anyway.
It’s easy to say that you’re committed to completing a project. Anyone can say they’re committed. But a real commitment means that you’re willing to do the dirty work. It may slow you down. It may frustrate you. You may need to take more breaks in order to get through it. But when you’re committed, you accept the existence of difficult work, and you decide to push through it regardless of the difficulty. This is a key difference between starting projects and finishing them.

Most of the perceived difficulty has nothing to do with the true nature of the task anyway. You’re simply interpreting the task in a way that creates resistance. So a commitment to complete difficult tasks is really a commitment to face and overcome your own resistance. It’s a commitment to overcome the limiting beliefs that prevent you doing certain types of work.
To complete a project, you must eventually do the steps required for project completion. If you don’t feel like doing a particular step, and you use your feelings to justify avoidance of that step, then your project will remain stuck in an incomplete state, the “work-in-progress” state. A better approach is to recognize that a task is just a task, and it’s subject to many different interpretations as to how pleasant or unpleasant it may be, so instead of looking at it from a perspective that creates unpleasantness, you can choose to regard the task as simply one more stepping stone on par with all the others.

Asserting Your Dominant Will

A strategy I’ve found that works well is more of a mind-set than a technique. It’s the mind-set that says, “No matter what, my conscious will is ultimately in charge, and it always has the ability to step in and take command immediately.”

When you tackle a challenging goal, you’re going to catch yourself feeling down now and then. At some point your conscious will steps in and says, “Hey, you’re procrastinating. This is a waste of time. That barely noticeable voice is your inner alarm clock. Instead of hitting the snooze button, pull that thought into the centre of your consciousness and amplify it. Give it your full attention.

When you give that thought your full attention and let its voice be heard, it gets louder: “Wake up, you lazy person! You don’t need to be checking the news right now. You have much more important things to be doing. Get back to work!”

Self-Dominance vs. Self-Abuse

When you wrap your identity into the part of you that wants to procrastinate, you’ll have a tendency to beat yourself up. When you look back and realize you wasted a lot of time, you’re identifying with the part of you that procrastinates. So when you get frustrated with that part, you’re getting frustrated with yourself. And when you beat up that part of yourself for its bad habits, you’re abusing yourself. This won’t help. It will simply perpetuate the cycle and keep you stuck.

The problem is that when you self-identify with the part of you that procrastinates, and then you beat up that part of yourself, you’re lowering your self-esteem. You’re saying to yourself, I’m such a loser. I can’t get anything done. This is self-abuse. It cannot help you. Don’t do this.

Avoid self-identifying with the part of you that procrastinates. Imagine that the part of you that procrastinates is the animal part of you. It’s prehistoric baggage.
The real you is the part of you that’s conscious and aware. This is the part of you that’s capable of making high-level decisions. This is the part of you that sets goals and takes on projects that aren’t essential for survival.

In order to shift yourself to a place of achievement, you must claim your role as Master over the part of you that wants to be lazy. You have the power to be dominant over this part of you. Your conscious will is so much stronger.

Strengthening Your Will

Just like a muscle, your conscious will grow stronger when you exercise it regularly, and it weakens when you fail to exercise it.

Fortunately, no matter how weak you’ve allowed yourself to become in this area, you can always train yourself back up to a place of strength.

Practicing self-dominance can actually be fun. A good way to practice is to verbalize your commands to yourself out loud. Tell yourself what to do, as if commanding the lazy part to get in line.

For example, if you have a tendency to want to stay in bed when your alarm goes off, say to yourself, “On your feet now! Get dressed and brush your teeth.” Imagine that this commanding voice is your true self commanding aspects of your lower self. Your fully conscious self is commanding parts of you that are less conscious. See the truth that the real you really does want to get out of bed. You want to have that experience today. Choosing to do the opposite isn’t really you. No matter how much you struggle with this, that’s okay. It’s a lifelong challenge, and perfection isn’t a realistic standard.

Whenever you catch yourself going into negative emotions, or self-identification with laziness and procrastination, take a moment to reassert your dominant will. Take stock of who you really are, and issue the proper commands for what you are to do in this moment. Doing so will reduce work-in-progress and at the same time diminish stress levels and let you excel in business at all levels!