Clean Up Your Messes & Incompletes

If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk? – Laurence J. Peter

I really like to say this about a lot of people.  If you walk into a friends home and it’s an absolute mess, what do you think is happening within the mind?  People who can’t properly care for themselves ranging from a simple morning routine involving a shower, to the severely obese beings who continue to saturate themselves with the worst-processed-foods-imaginable.

You ask yourself, “why?”

I personally can’t think if my condo is a mess.  Every morning after meditation, I take a pre-workout before working out, and while it’s kicking it, I literally clean my condo within 2 minutes so when I come back, my clothes are laid out and ready to go for work.

This doesn’t just revolve around the physical world, but also the psychological world.

Look at it this way by bullet points.

• Decide
• Plan
• Start
• Continue
• Finish
• Complete

This is called the Cycle of Completion.  This is a great diagram Jack Canfield has in his book.

Are there areas in your life where you’ve left uncompleted projects or failed to get closure with people?  When you don’t complete the past, you can’t be free to fully embrace anything that’s happening in the present and it surely blocks anything from coming in, too.

When you start anything in life, make an agreement or identify a change you need to make, it goes into your present memory bank and takes up what Jack calls an “attention unit.”  We can only pay attention to so many things at one time, and each promise, agreement, or item on your to-do list leaves fewer attention units to dedication to completing other things.

Another Example of this is Tim Ferris.  He goes to bed on a clean conscious every night by rambling on paper everything that’s on his mind.  It could be that advertiser who pissed him off, the person who didn’t give the correct change back…ANYTHING.  Why? These events that take place during the day rob us of attention units.

A lot of us take on requests, projects, tasks and other things; however, we really want to say no, but we’re afraid of being perceived as the “bad one.” So what happens if you put off responding in order to avoid saying no.

Meanwhile the sticky notes and stacks of paper pile up and distract you.  There may be times whereas you have to make some uncomfortable decisions….but it’s better struggling with discomfort then cleaning up those incomplete.

Some incompletions come from simply not having adequate systems.  Other incompletions pile up due to bad working habits.  Be firm, assertive, and just say no.