On Being Unfinished - Part 1

Table of Contents

Some Context

Through self-employment, I’ve had the opportunity to study my behavior through a different lens than I’ve previously had while working for various employers. I’ve been able to really observe the triggers that create certain behavioral responses from my brain, how those responses make me feel, and what role all of that has in the dynamics of my environment.

Beyond my struggle with perfectionism, more specifically, I struggle with the process of things.

I don’t like the process. I can’t appreciate the journey. I like the idea of liking those things. I like songs that sing about them, quotes that remind us these things, and while at a cerebral level, I agree that it’s “the climb” that makes life interesting, not just the outcome of reaching the top of a mountain, at a cellular level, I hate it.

I want the ends, not the means. I want the results, not the work. I want the outcome, not the process.

My response to learning this was first one of contrarian-hell-yeah. Let me embrace this. Acknowledge it and see if I can’t use this new factoid about my personality to my advantage, not my disadvantage. After some time sitting with it, discussing it with my partner and having him agree with me, and realizing how much anxiety this fight against learning and processing tasks causes me, I’ve decided to start unpacking it more. Not because I want to be a better person or employee or worker.

I am studying this because I want to sleep better, worry less, and enjoy my life, and if my life is going to be as full of incomplete processes as it has been in the past, then I need to learn how to live with incompleteness, and not fight it every damn day.

As a Business Owner

How “incompleteness” or “unfinishedness” impacts me from an employment perspective is probably one of the biggest portions of my life. I’ve always worked a lot, most of the time for other people, and I’ve generally found myself burning out, in some jobs much harder than in others. This last time around, working for myself again in my creative solopreneur work (JA Murphy Designs LLC), I began to realize my stress isn’t 100% my employer, my workload, my relationship with difficult-to-work-with-coworkers, or the number of video calls I have in a week. Yes, all of those things contribute, but there are a lot of anxieties and stressors that followed me into a job that allow for much more control of the above stressors.

Even with complete say on my schedule, my workload, and who I deal with, I still am carrying around stress-levels akin to having a “regular job”. I’ve started to identify and pull out the stressors more, and I’ve been able to identify what are stressors I can work on and control, versus environmental stressors I can’t.

Arbitrary, Yet Aggressive Deadlines

Setting overly aggressive deadlines for tasks or projects, then missing them, and then stressing over missing them is one of my signature moves. These deadlines are typically set from a place of fear of being in-progress for “too long”.

This tendency is one of the main reasons I have left the goal setting paradigm entirely. Goals are a huge problem for me, and the goal setting pattern of setting a target, a timeframe (which historically for me has always been wildly impossible), and then using that as motivation to “enjoy a process”, has never worked. It has always backfired. Even if my deadline isn’t aggressive, goal-setting backfires on me.

Pat, my partner in life and in making creative things, has often pointed out these deadlines are also arbitrary. Meaning, the only person who cares about these random dates I put on things is me. Even for tasks at work, the deadlines were usually self-driven, and therefore typically flexible, but I would hold so steadfast to them I’d work ridiculous hours to meet them.

So to recap: I’d have a task that I decide I want to do, I’d choose a random date to do / complete by, I am the only person who knows and / or cares about this date, and I would crush myself to meet this date no matter what type of things come up delaying the task. If I made the deadline, I’d resent the task / process and never want to do it again. If I missed the deadline, I’d ruminate in how much of a failure I am.

Get all that?

Some ways I’m adjusting:

  • This cyclical pattern is most triggered by goal-setting, which is why I have stopped setting goals entirely.

  • If a task / deadline / due date is set by me and is flexible, I put it in my Google Tasks section. This makes it easy to carry over to the next day either by dragging / dropping it or by just letting it move over by itself. It makes the “incompleteness” slightly more tolerable with less friction.

  • If a task / deadline / due date doesn’t actually exist, but I don’t want to forget about it, I list it somewhere else. Right now, for me, I track my backlog in Atlassian Confluence and JIRA.

  • If a task / deadline / due date is externally set (i.e. a show I sign up for), I have a list of prioritized tasks that I spread out in days leading up to the due date, but I also note what are absolutely required and what are nice-to-haves. Nice-to-have tasks are the first to get cut when time starts to run out. I then remind myself that the task is still a success even if I don’t do every single thing I wanted.

  • If the task is something I want to do daily, and I don’t do it, the next day I go into my Google tasks and I… DELETE IT. Just for that day I didn’t do it. This removes it from my shame-mental-load. I do not think twice about it. I do not let myself feel disappointment. I just say: “I didn’t do that, delete.” By not emoting over it, I give myself the mental space to pick it up today without feeling “guilty” for not doing it yesterday.

Rumination

In my brief reading of the internet, ruminating over incomplete tasks is our brain’s way of helping us remember to complete it. While I appreciate my brain trying to help me out, the level of anxiety this causes me in a world where most days have incomplete tasks to them, can be overwhelming.

For me this manifests in lack of sleep, nagging my partner (because my mind is nagging me), and general irritation and inability to focus (because my mind is running in circles around multiple tasks).

I noticed this settled quite a bit when I started working for myself because the number of minor incomplete tasks was minimized. I get a lot less emails, have less calls, and less “follow ups” than I’ve EVER had. This helped me really start to narrow down this trigger and understand it better. Because I wasn’t living in a constant rumination state anymore, when I did find myself in one, I was able to identify it and study it more clearly.

The first time I really noticed it was when I obsessed over a late night Etsy order. I could NOT stop thinking about getting it out to the post office. I walked that pre-paid package into my post office and handed it to a lady to know for sure she was going to scan it in and start the tracking process. She didn’t. I started to pay more attention to the “pick up” times and when they get scanned into the system and the tracking number updated, and I noticed it rarely mattered when during the day I dropped it off. Once I realized this, I relaxed into having boxes waiting to go to the post office in an incomplete state on my counter.

This little exercise helped me realize my rumination problem, and it helped me recognize when it was happening, label it, and mentally tell myself to let it go. Stop thinking about it (which takes a LOT of practice).

Some things I do to stop thinking about unfinished things (all of these are about releasing the information from my rumination-memory line by assuring myself I have an external system in place to properly remind myself):

  • Add a Google Task to my calendar

  • Email myself and leave it unread until I’m ready

  • Physically write a post-it note somewhere and leave it where I know I’ll visit (coffee pot, keys, on the front door, etc)

  • Create a Google Event on my calendar

  • Set an Alarm on my phone (with a label… to remind you what you’re reminding yourself).

  • Tell my husband (or whoever is sitting next to me). The act of saying it out loud helps me recall things later.

Procrastination

I’m the weirdest kind of procrastinator. I waffle between precrastination and procrastination, and really struggle to balance the two.

By working for myself, I was able to start really identifying what triggers my procrastination (and precrastination), and I found:

  • I use precrastination - completing tasks quickly, even if they’re not important or a good use of my time - as a form of procrastinating on less-desirable tasks (i.e. posting on social media instead of creating that Etsy listing).

  • I procrastinate heavily and the most on tasks I don’t want to do (i.e. creating Etsy listings).

  • I procrastinate if my task list for the day is too long and I can’t easily figure out where to start.

  • A project will be procrastinated if I don’t first take the time to break it down into smaller tasks.

There are books and blogs that are much more educated in how to beat procrastination. These tips are tiny, but they work for me, and are a culmination of reading books and self-help blogs over the years. I’ve tweaked my thought process quite a bit this past year, and I think you see it most reflected here.

To beat procrastination I:

  • Keep my to-dos small, in chunks that I can do in one day or in a few hours. If I have a project in mind that’s too large, I create a task called “Plan Project” which is the task of breaking a project down into smaller tasks. This makes it easier to get started.

  • I notate if there’s an external deadline and build in buffers to not stress myself out. If I don’t need to do my task immediately, then I put it in my Google Tasks for a few days before the external deadline. This helps me stop ruminating, but also prevents precrastination, where I do tasks that don’t actually need to be done, so I can focus on other priorities.

  • I let go of “time of day” expectations. I prefer to work out in the morning, but if I don’t, I consciously remind myself that I can workout later in the day. This helps me get things done instead of writing them off because I missed some arbitrary time-of-day deadline I set for myself. This also helps me with prioritization, in case there’s a task I’m procrastinating and need to get done sooner rather than later.

Mantras I Use

While I can’t control all of the stressors in my life, I can work on adjusting my responses to situations that arise. For me, having incomplete tasks, unfinished business, is a major stressor, and as a business owner, a home owner, and generally an adult this day and age, I have a lot of unfinished business. Working on how I handle the triggers of running my own small creative business, I’ve noticed that I can reduce my anxiety. It takes a ton of exposure and practice, and there’s still a lot of room for growth, but I know it’s working, and will continue to work.

I’m trying hard to remind myself that even though I don’t like it, it is a process.

It will get easier with time, practice, exposure.

When I doubt this I try to remind myself what it was like for me a year ago. Posting an Etsy listing created so much anxiety in me. Now I’m used to hitting “Publish Listing”. Creating an Instagram post required planning, editing in Canva, a scheduler that let me continue to review and edit. Now I post from my phone if something pops into my head. Going to the post office would nag at me until I did it. Now I make a pile for an evening drop off and don’t think anything of it. I used to stress for multiple days that the package was going to get lost, ruined, or I mailed all the wrong stuff. Now I know, if (which I highly doubt it will) that does happen, I have the customer service skills to address it at the time it happens. These are all things I’ve grown into over the past year, by posting listings, having orders, mailing things out, and having no complaints from real-life customers.

I also try to remember that I’m new to all of this and

Don’t compare your beginnings to someone else’s middle or end.

1 year ago, January 2023, I was just teaching myself Etsy and how to print my own mugs at home. I didn’t have my Cricut, my top-of-the-line art printer, my laser engraver, or know how to repeatedly knit a hat that fits. I didn’t know how to sell in person, set up a display, or make earrings. Since January, I’ve sold hundreds of stickers (damn Cricut), printed 10’s of mugs, sold hundreds of pairs of earrings made by me or Pat, went to the Rochester Public Market something like 15 times to sell in-person, participated in two art shows, and have learned so many other things in-between. This took a year. A lot has changed in a year, but it took a year. Growth takes time, especially in business.

Consciously reminding myself of these two mantras whenever I’m finding myself in an anxiety spell helps me move forward and not freeze in this space.

Part 2

4/1/2024 Update - Part 2 is now available here!

11/29/2023 Update - Part 2 is currently percolating in my head. With enough coffee and meditation, I’ll get there, and will update this section with a link to it. Follow my social media (Instagram) for regular updates.

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On Being a Technical Woman