Finish What You Start: Focus What You Do

Finish What You Start

🚀 What is it about in 3 Sentences

1. The book explains the art of following through with focus to finish what you have started.

2. The art of following through is centered around mastering the following disciplines : Focus, Self Discipline, Action & Persistence.

3. This book takes a more holistic approach and aims to close the majority of gaps in the productivity systems, in contrast to most self-improvement books on productivity that are obsessed on a single problem and strive to tackle that problem after portraying it as the underlying cause of all obstacles.

💁‍♂️Who’s it for ?

1. To those who wish to make their intentions a reality.

2. Those who struggle to get things done.

3. Productivity geeks

✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

A lifetime string of “laters” ends up being woven into the noose of “never.”

Good time management is a superpower only the enlightened have seemed to master.

The next time you feel that you’re about to give in to an urge or temptation, stop and ask yourself how you will feel 10 minutes, 10 hours, and 10 days from now. This rule may not seem all that powerful, but it’s effective because it forces you to think about your future self and to see how your actions are going to affect yourself in the future—for better or worse.

📒 Summary and Reflections

🖌 The Art of Following Through With Focus

Despite knowing the advantages it brings to our lives and the repercussions we face if we don’t, we frequently find ourselves difficult to complete crucial tasks. Some of us find it difficult to begin a task or activity, while others struggle to follow through. There are literally too many villains to defeat, such as procrastination, a lack of drive, unending distractions, and so on. Hence we must learn “The Art of Following Through” if we are to escape from all of these difficulties. It is a powerful combination of focus, self- discipline, action, and persistence. It’s the technique that drives you toward higher professional achievements, better relationships, and greater personal satisfaction. Let’s explore this idea further:

🙆‍♂️The Head : Focus. The head of following through is having focus. Focus keeps you steadfast & firm in your way towards a goal.

🦴The spine: Self Discipline is what enables you to get your head down and work when you need to, even if you don’t want to. It’s the ability to control yourself so that you retain focus on what needs to be done, despite the temptations and distractions you may encounter.

💪🦶The hands and feet: Action. This is the execution part. Action is the roadmap of things that we do to get from Point A to Point B (our goal). Without action, plans remain abstract and goals remain dreams.

🫀 The heart : Persistence is firmly sticking to something for a prolonged period of time. Most of our pursuits in life are not just a sprint but a marathon. Hence, Patience and Perseverance are keys to reaching the finish line.

Why don’t we follow through?

We don’t follow through for two reasons:

🛑 Inhibiting Tactics: The tactics we use to waste our time and energy and thus prevent us from completing our goals. These tactics include: (1) setting bad goals, (2) procrastination, (3) indulging in temptations and distractions, and (4) poor time management.

🚧 Psychological Road Blocks: These are internal, sometimes unconscious systems in our minds that operate as impediments to action. These mechanisms include (1) laziness and a lack of discipline, (2) fear of criticism, rejection, and failure, (3) perfectionism and (4) a lack of self-awareness. These psychological obstacles work inwardly to impede exterior action, preventing us from acting.

😋How to Stay Hungry & Focused? Is Motivation a Myth?

You can’t rely just on your passion. When the ugly sides of any adventure arise, your passion fades. So how can we keep ourselves hungry and motivated? For that you need to be consciously aware of what make you motivated at first place. Motivation is defined as anything that makes you want to work toward a goal. It is that which discourage you from quitting up. There are several ways to describe motivation, but a useful framework for viewing them are external and internal motivations. External motivators are when we leverage other people, places, and things to push us into action. For the most part, these are when we want to avoid negative consequences involving other people, places, and things. These methods include accountability partners and groups, putting money down upfront, and self-bribery. Internal motivators are when we look at how we stand to benefit and improve our lives. These are universal needs, drives, and desires that are easy to lose track of. The easy way to find these is to answer a set of questions that directly asks things such as how am I going to benefit from this and how does my life stand to improve from this? It’s only through answering these questions that you realize what you are neglecting.

💵Opportunity cost: Understanding opportunity cost is understanding your sacrifices. When you are doing some work, you are also actually putting off other work. We actually have a zillion things to do in our life, but we know that we should pursue things that are important & makes the difference. For eg: If you are doing early morning working out, know that you are putting off sleep. Opportunity cost can be of time, wealth & other resources. We can deal with this mental obstacle by playing with the cost-benefit ratio so the cost is minimized or the benefit is maximized.

Tips & Tricks to Smash Procrastination & Achieve Success.

🙇‍♂️ Avoid Overthinking: Overthinking kills positivity & productivity. It’s nothing but self delusion as it mimics progress. You may think you are proactive & busy, but in reality you are adding the inertia rather than eliminating it. By overthinking you may consider many options and doing too much research, which limits your ability to make an executive decision.

📉 Keep a Scoreboard & an incentive/reward for each Project: Measure every tasks & celebrate the success with self rewarding. This system motivates & boosts productivity.

🚦Create a Manifesto: The problems with self discipline and motivation is that it fades. So what to do when it fades? One of the solution to cure this problem is to create a set of rules. Rules are pre-determined mental models that helps you decide which direction to take. Without rules, if you leave it for yourself to decide, you will inevitably fall for your desires. An example of a rule is: Three Tasks Maximum.

🧠Developing Follow-Through Mindsets: Following through on anything requires a mental effort, especially when faced with discouraging barriers. Mindsets can help with this. A mindset is a predetermined method of seeing and handling circumstances and challenges. Certain mindsets are all that is required to discover the will and drive to complete a task. Read how mindsets influence success

🍩 Temptation Bundling: By integrating current and future selves and their conflicting wants, temptation bundling is an effective and efficient approach to fight procrastination and enhance productivity. There is no need to suffer in the present in order to do something for your future self; if you do, you will lose motivation and delay. So figure out how to combine your desires with your long-term ambitions. In other words, pair your commitments with immediate rewards.

1️⃣ Atomic Habits: Another way to tame procrastination is to begin with tiny, manageable improvements. Tasks should be broken down into minute, microscopic components. This makes your initial move appear quite simple—and taking that first step is the most challenging aspect of procrastination. Read more about the power of atomic habits.

🪢 Batching: Batching is the process of grouping similar tasks together in order to execute them all at once. One of the reasons Ford’s assembly line was so successful was because it was almost entirely batching, as employees only did one task really well. Batching allows you to save mental energy for the job itself rather than waste it switching back and forth between them.

📐 40-70 rule: Colin Powell, former Secretary of State of the United States, has a rule of thumb for making decisions and taking action. He claims that when faced with a difficult decision, you should have no less than 40% and no more than 70% of the knowledge you need to make that decision. In that range, you have enough knowledge to make an informed decision but not so much that you lose your determination and merely keep up with the situation.

“We often avoid taking action because we think “I need to learn more,” but the best way to learn is often by taking action.”
James Clear

⚙️ Set Daily Systems for Success: As James Clear said in his book Atomic habits “ You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Your goal is your desired outcome Your system is the collection of daily habits that will get you there”

Systems are sets of daily behaviors. It doesn’t have to be more complex than that. Systems stand in stark contrast to goals because goals are one-off accomplishments, while systems emphasize consistency and long-term success. Daily systems streamline work and cut down on the amount of willpower you require to plug on in life. They make actions systematic and therefore they encourage progress.

“If you genuinely care about the goal, you’ll focus on the system.”
James Clear