Focus and Finish

Do you ever look at your to-do list as too big to conquer, hopping from item to item, leaving things unfinished?

As soon as Christmas ended, my mind moved on to the business launch in February, and the official to-do lists began to compile. Ever since then, I've spent a good portion of every week designing, researching, or filling out paperwork, online or downtown.

Some of these tasks are more enjoyable for me. I enjoy designing door hangers, ordering business cards, building websites, and working in photoshop/illustrator to get the truck lettering just right. On the other hand, some of the tasks were drudgeries: particularly any task that hit a roadblock and required extended phone or email conversations with a poorly trained customer service representative.

I would have a tendency to focus on the tasks that were snag free from conception to completion and to put off the tasks where I may have to interact with someone who had proved their incompetence already.

At the beginning of last week, I was listening to the StoryBrand podcast and heard the phrase, "Focus and Finish." The point being that we should prioritize our lists and focus on each task from start to finish. It resonated deeply with my current to-do list and the items I had been avoiding. I moved through the list then, one by one, seeing each item through to the finish line before moving to the next.

"Focus and Finish" has been such a helpful, simple phrase for me, and I knew it could encourage you to stay on task as well. I designed several desktop backgrounds, with different designs, containing the phrase, and you can download them by clicking on the pictures in this blog post and then right clicking on the image to save or download them to your computer.