CLOSED!

My parents closed on a house today.  They sold a house they'd been working on for over five years. This remodel project was quite a long project and today is a day of celebration for our family!  A chapter is finished. Mom and dad can finally put a bow on this project.  Money, time, and emotional energy are freed up to be spent elsewhere.

I love the feeling of a finished project. It means, even in a very small way, that a chapter is done.  This one has been five long years in the making, and as it has finally come to a close it makes me think about all the open projects on my plate right now... all the things left unfinished that I could easily put a bow on and label "closed" with a little push of extra effort. 

Here are four tips that I could do a much better job living out when it comes to completing projects.  Most of these come from Getting Things Done by David Allen, but I have paraphrased... These are incomplete, so read the book or take the course.  Regardless, here the are: 

1. Spend some time on project planning.  Map out exactly what needs to get done. (There's more involved with "sell the house" than just selling the house... we have to research local realtors, call and enlist a realtor, prep the house to show, and the list goes on and on...)

2. Do the things you don't wanna do first... tackle the tough stuff and reward yourself with the more fun, less stressful tasks later on down the road.

3. Break projects into as many actionable tasks as possible.  Use clear action words like read, find, email, install, buy, etc.  I'm infamous for writing "finish..." which is nothing but overwhelming and vague.

4. Put these actionable steps in your trusted system, as David Allen would say.  Don't write out tasks in eight different places and in four different forms.