To get through life with less stress, you must understand the power of completions. On your path to understanding about completions, your primary step is understanding that ultimately, everything becomes complete. Every single pile in your office will, one way or the other, cease to exist in time. Your piles will diminish because you’ve acted on them; there is an earthquake and the building collapses; or because someone takes over your office when you move on, are replaced, or die.

The light bulbs in your lights will burn out in 700 to 800 hours just as your car’s water pump will give out in 3 years. Jupiter will complete a revolution around the sun in 11.9 years. A tortoise on the Galapagos Islands will draw its last breath, on average, in about 100 years. Cro-Magnon man lasted about 30,000 years. Dinosaurs ruled the earth for a couple of hundred millions years, and the sun’s remaining life is about 5 billion years. Even the humankind will come to a completion at some point. All things come to completion.

From Small Acorns

As simple as it seems, when you awake each morning, you have completed sleep for that night. When you turn in a big report at work, and you know it’s ready, that is a completion. Large or small, completions provide a mental and emotional break. They help you to feel better. Simply putting away the dishes or taking out the garbage are completions that yield benefits.

You can continually gain completions in every area of your life. They can be achieved on multi-year projects, or activities that only last a few seconds. Achieving completions is energizing because it offers a clean end to activities or even thoughts, and a good beginning for what’s next.

Completions All Around

To understand how you can put the power of completions to work for you in your everyday life, let’s look at the example of Megan. Megan was a systems consultant to several organizations. To complete each engagement, she had to prepare and deliver a final report.

In years past, Megan thought it was enough to write, proof, and format the entire report for on-schedule e-mail to the client. Previously, Megan would tie up loose ends several days or weeks after sending the report, while in the midst of other activities.

Recognizing the power of completions, however, Megan took steps to eliminate potential interruptions when she was on a role. She built proofing and formatting her report into her schedule. She also updated her files, completed project logs, cost data, and invoices. She even streamlined her working notes file.

By viewing all aspects of the engagement as a unit, Megan was able to finish up all related activities by the time the report was transmitted. Megan was clear mentally and emotionally by the time of transmission. She felt good about her accomplishment and was energized to start what came next.