A fully decorated room!
A website filled with content that you’re proud of!
A finally finished fanfiction from the 8th grade!
What do these things all have in common? They are complete. They are a full checkmark in the box of your life and can finally move out of your already chaotic brain. Honestly, there’s just something about a fully done task that really gets me going. I make to-do lists all the time (I have a notebook dedicated solely to making lists) to get to this level of transcendent completion, but recently I’ve been struggling with actually following through with my tasks. I decided it was time to be a real journalist and to find a reason why I’m not completing things, even though I love it.
“It is all too easy to treat the to-do list like a menu where you’re constantly ordering the easiest-to-swallow tasks, while the more undesirable tasks fester and grow in number,” E. J. Masicampo says for Harvard Business Review. If we actually have a set action plan to complete the items on our list, we can reach completion much faster than if we just simply slap it on a list and call it a day.
Another reason why we love completion is because it “eases the uncertainty we may feel about whether we’ll be able to achieve the task, and the related anxiety and cognitive tension we may experience at the thought of not completing it.” It’s interesting because this could actually be a byproduct of our animalistic nature from way back in the day, except instead of having anxiety over where our next meal will be or whether we will survive to the next day, it’s over that unfinished fanfiction we wrote over five years ago. Psychology is so cool, guys!
In an effort to put my completion skills to the test, I set off to complete the activities that I had started, whether that be my almost finished junk journal, that one call I need to make that I am absolutely dreading, those video games I need to finish, or even this post. We’ll start with the easiest task and move to increasingly difficult ones to see if I can use any of my previously learned skills to my advantage.
Background: For my job, I have to get a company debit card to use my discount. Unfortunately for me, my pdfs glitched out the first time and I didn’t submit the right materials. Now I have to call and ask about it. I have been putting this off for two weeks.
Mission 1 Action Plan:
-Type in phone number
-Talk to representative
I shakily typed in the same number that I had been trying to call for weeks. I sat on hold, hoping that they would be able to do something to help me. Soon, a very nice woman answered the phone. After I slowly repeated my address (I always get scared that I talk too fast for the phone to pick up), she told me halfway through to tell me that I had already been approved for it.
Now this might seem silly to you all. “Why did we need all of this build up just for you to call someone?” I’m going to be very honest with you all when I say that I have extreme anxiety calling someone on the phone. I get really nervous when I’m talking to someone and I can’t read any of the expressions on their face. Anyways, I don’t like how anticlimactic that mission was. I actually didn’t even have to call them because I had already been approved (would have enjoyed receiving an email about that). However, with our action plan, I actually completed a task that I had been dreading for a decent amount of time! Yay!
Background: I’m sorry if this hurts anyone’s feelings, but I have no problem ripping out sketchbook pages in order to complete a sketchbook. I’ve finished three sketchbooks so far, and I rip out pages all the time. The reason I do that is because sometimes things feel really stale to me. I just want to be done with it. I have seven pages left in my junk journal and I’m going to try my hardest to actually fill them up.
Mission 2 Action Plan:
*This marks the point where I gave up with this concept for about four or five days.
I just ripped out the leftover pages and focused entirely on painting the cover of my new sketchbook.
I completed a total of two tasks in the week I allotted myself. It’s really hard when you set goals for yourself and you just don’t complete them. I feel like I’ve wasted the week away, doing things I didn’t have to do and avoiding writing this article. I can’t help but feel like I’m losing my spark.
The good thing is that I know that I’m not the only one who is dealing with this constant cycle of “I’m stressed and I need to feel better about myself” to “I’m a shitty person and I should be done with this by now.” So I decided to do a little research on how I can negate this cycle of evil once and for all.
I got stuck down this rabbit hole of short attention spans leading to lack of ability to actually complete a task. I thought that phones would be the answer, especially with the rise in popularity of the “phone detox” helping people take back their lives and their focus. However, I found another possible route that may have been the reason why I was having such a hard time with these tasks in particular. On Quora, a man named Russell Fong gave this straightforward response about attention spans: “The brain finds it difficult to process information when the person doesn’t care. It seems to be a waste of energy to the ever efficient brain. So the brain doesn’t waste time or energy processing stuff it’s not interested in.”
“It’s not personal.”
Now Russell from Fiji brings up a good point. Obviously I was not interested in making that phone call, otherwise it would have been done a lot earlier. I must not have been creatively charged at that moment because I just wanted to finish my journal and move on to the next one. But what about the tasks that I “completed” that I didn’t necessarily need to complete. The ones that my brain was actually interested in?
Here’s a list of the same week I attempted this experiment:
-Got my wisdom teeth out
-Watched the entirety of Pop Star Academy on Netflix
-Completed several chapters’ worth of content in Deltarune
-Hung out with my friends
-Decorated my new sketchbook cover
-Planned a new time to film a segment for a web show
I think that my issue with completing tasks stems from the fact that it’s not enjoyable to complete the tasks that I genuinely don’t want to do. If I looked at all of the things I’ve completed over the course of the week, I wouldn’t think that I was such a terrible person. While at the beginning I thought that all I had “completed” was a phone call I didn’t have to make and a project that I ended up literally destroying, actually I completed a lot of things!
So here comes the real question: How do I force myself to do the things I don’t want to do? While I would love to live in a world where all of the tasks I complete are fun ones that I enjoy doing, the reality is that that isn’t necessarily all I’m going to have to do.