When 95% Done isn’t DONE
No one taught me how to generate useful goals nor how to work on my goals over time. Not knowing what I was doing, when I was a wee graduate student, I focused on moving projects forward. Diligently I would make a to-do list and work on all of my tasks at once. I had three categories of tasks: “Not Done”, “In Progress”, and “Done”. As soon as I did anything on a task, I gave myself permission to mark it from “Not Done” to “In Progress”. Once I actually finished the task, I marked it as “Done”.
To be completely frank, I was just as proud of the goals I moved from “Not Done” to “In Progress” as I was of my “Done” goals. As you might imagine, under this system I got stuff done (I do have my PhD y’all so I wasn’t a mess the *entire* time) but I couldn’t understand why things would stay on my to-do list for months on end. At the time I couldn’t see the problem with trying to advance everything on my to list at the same time, as I assumed that moving five projects simultaneously was the same thing as moving five projects sequentially.
Fast forward a few years to my postdoc and joining a new lab. This lab does group collective goals on a weekly basis. I was stoked to hear about this, as I thought I was an organizational guru and already tracked my goals on a weekly basis anyway. The first time we did goals I again wrote down my goals and worked all week on them. Of the ten goals I wrote down, I completed one of them, industriously worked on eight of them (I did have a postdoctoral mentor to impress you know), and only didn’t get to one goal. I was feeling good about the goal reckoning. My advisor took one look at my goals and said “This chart does not contain an option for ‘in progress’ goals. Goals are either completed or not. Turn all of those 'in progress’ goals to ‘not done’. ”
Dear reader, I was mortified! My list of goals somehow went from nine goals either done or in progress to a single goal out of ten completed. Thinking about my list in this way, however painful my introduction to this method, was an absolute game changer. Instead of focusing on getting things out of the gate, so to speak, I focused on bringing them home. When I had to triage my goals towards the end of the week, I prioritized the ones I could turn from “Not Done” to “Done” instead of trying to give every task some attention each week.
After reframing my goals in this way, I started to notice I was more productive. Things were less likely to fester on my to-do lists, as the things I couldn’t finish one week were the perfect tasks to start with the next week. I also became wiser about the goals I could reasonably accomplish each week because I wanted to be able to have a column of “Done”s during our goal review. Making reasonable, or SMART, goals made it easier to make progress. Finally, I became more productive because I no longer wasted time task switching. I thought I could multi-task well but in fact, all of my multi-tasking slowed me down. It took cognitive effort to keep all of my projects in my head at once and I lost time every time I moved from one project to the next without finishing it.
In the words of a famous Yale professor, if you have eight manuscripts 95% done, what do you have? NOTHING! A 95% done manuscript is like the hare who saw the finish line and decided to take a nap instead of powering through and crossing it. For most tasks, we don’t get credit for merely working on them. We get credit for completing them, so place the reward and the mental pat on the back where it belongs. On completion, rather than “in progress”.
P.S. One of my favorite gospel songs in this vein is “99 and a half”. I listen to it when I’m trying to push myself into finishing some onerous task. May it help you too!
