I’ve been out in the yard all day today, cleaning up from the hurricane and cold weather. It’s February and looks to be warming up for at least the next couple of weeks. There will be a few more cold snaps before the end of April but it was just time to get started. And I couldn’t sit inside for another entire weekend – I already have enough trouble getting work done during the week and I am growing tired of looking back at every weekend thinking I could have done something. So today I did.

While I was toiling and cutting down dead trees, I began to think about why I have so much trouble finishing things. I believe this problem is multi-faceted. I know the many attributes of my shortcomings, but today with earbuds in for many hours I realized these things in tandem:

• I have many interests and I want to do so many things.
• Many of these interests are spinning in my mind simultaneously, but I can only focus on one of them at a time.
• When I try to dig in and do a thing, often I do not finish due to time/knowledge/material constraints.
• Returning to that thing is typically never done because it was not critical and I never took notes so I don’t know where to pick it back up. It usually gets buried and stale anyway, so the ‘project’ must be started from the beginning again.

I don’t know where I was going with this. I lost the epiphany I had while I was tending a fire. I’m pretty sure I was thinking the best thing to work on for myself is to practice finishing things. If there is a thing I want to do, I should whole-ass commit and do it. I feel it would be fantastically rewarding to finish something every day, and that might be a source for quality dopamine.

I think I’m really writing here about changing habits. I should be more upset about not having finished the one thing I set out to do that day, so I may be more motivated to charge on when I wake up the next morning. I could also do with being a better curator of projects. Not many things need to be even started; they’re just interesting to me. I should prune those from the list, or separate them from those projects that would be more impactful or beneficial – the ones that would result in a better life for me and my family.

I’m going to go now and make prioritized lists. I will report back if my mind allows it.