Why You’ll Never Be Finished (And How to Figure Out When You’ve Done Enough)

By the time you’ve dealt with all the urgent messages in your inbox, five more have come in.

When you get through your list of tweaks to your website, you start thinking about a whole new design.

Once you’ve finished a piece of work for one client, there’s always something else waiting.

You’ve got three projects on the go in the evenings, and two of them are inevitably falling behind.

Any of those sound familiar? Wilma asked:

How do you know if you have done enough?
When I was employed it was easy, at least I had the weekend off. Now I am working for myself I do find it hard to stop because who is telling me when enough is enough?
It is a bit like when you start renovating the house, the more you do the more you see what else needs doing.

(Wilma Han, in a comment)

Want the quick answer? You won’t know. If you’re a full-time freelancer, if you’re working on personal projects outside a day job, or if you’ve got a hobby that takes up your weekends, there is no-one to tell you “enough is enough”. You will never finish.

There’s a bright side to this, of course. You get to decide how much you want to do. If you’re self-employed, you set your own work hours. You take on the number of clients you want. You decide whether or not you’re going to down tools at 5pm.

Like so many things, that’s obvious, but so easy to ignore. I’m a long way from being perfect on this, but I’ve managed to stay (fairly) sane for the last year and a bit of freelancing, and I’ll go through a few things that can help you figure out when to stop.

Limiting What You Do

If it seems like there’s no end to the things you could, should or even want to be doing … try limiting what you do.

Here comes another obvious point, but one that’s easy to forget: every new project you take on has to displace something which you’re currently doing. In many cases, we squeeze new projects into our leisure time. This is often not a good thing: we need time to relax. We need time simply to dawdle and potter around, with our brain on idle mode. We need time to daydream. These things are not “unproductive”, because they’re what allow us to be productive at other times.

If you find it hard to stop, limit the number of projects that you take on at any one time. Focus on your two or three most important goals – and let the rest wait. It’s better to do three things well, and enjoy them, than to start on ten and never make any progress.

You only have a limited amount of attention … it is pointless to take on activities that you don’t have time to do properly. What ‘doing something properly’ means is that you give it enough attention to achieve your aims for it.

(Mark Forster, Get Everything Done And Still Have Time to Play – Amazon.com / Amazon.co.uk, p39)

Another way to limit what you do is to delegate. Perhaps you’re writing a novel (it’s not to let to get in on NaNoWriMo this month) – alongside running your business, and taking care of a house and/or kids. What can you delegate? Can you pay someone to take on administrative tasks? Can you employ a cleaner or childminder? Can you bribe your spouse or teenage kids to help out? Look for things which you dislike, which you aren’t good at, or both. There’s generally someone who can help.

Limiting When You Do It

I’m no fan of set working hours. Sure, I could decide to work religiously between 9am and 5pm, but frankly, that would cut out a lot of the fun of being self-employed.

Sticking to a traditional 9-5 day doesn’t tend to suit creative types, either. (And most of us are doing something that requires an element of creativity, whether it’s writing, blogging, graphic design, or academic studies.) None of us can focus well for several hours straight – and we have different peaks and troughs of energy during the day.

I think a lot of personal planners miss this and people look at all chunks of time as being equal. All chunks of time are not equal! I can get more done from 0800-1000 on most days than I can from 1600-2000, even though the latter block has twice as much time.

(Charlie Gilkey, How Heatmapping Your Productivity Can Make You More Productive, Productive Flourishing)

So how do you set limits on when you do your stuff? Try thinking along these lines:

• Taking a full hour “off” at lunch time
• Not working after dinner
• Not working at the weekend (or, say, between Saturday noon and Sunday evening)
• Setting an alarm clock to remind you to stop work at, say, 6pm
• Not working on public holidays – or setting your own holidays!
• Centring your work on your creative peaks – and setting “work-free” zones in your zonked-out times. Grab a copy of Charlie’s Productivity Heatmap to get started on this.
• Taking a longer break every once in a while. Hint: block three (or more) days out on the calendar, in a month or two’s time. Your work will magically flow around this.

However much you love what you do, you do need to have times when you simply recharge. I enjoy writing my novel, but I come back to it with renewed energy and enthusiasm after a day’s break.

Limiting How Long You Do It For

A lot of our projects require sustained work over a long period of time before we can call them “finished”: writing a book, losing weight, getting out of debt. You can’t knock these off in an afternoon or even a week.

This means that, when you work on that project, you need a limit on how much you’re going to do, so that you can tell yourself when you’ve done enough. Setting a time limit often works well, especially if it’s difficult to define mini-milestones in the project. It’s also easier to focus intensely and be at peak productivity when you know you haven’t got long.

• Try writing for an hour
• Give yourself thirty minutes to clear as many emails as possible
• Set aside two hours for research
• Spend just quarter of an hour doing your filing

Years ago, in school, I could cram a lot into an hour’s studying in the library (often when I’d neglected to do my homework until the last minute…) You might have had similar experiences at seminars, when you seem to accomplish much more than you would in a normal workday.

You might find that a timetable, with firm end times for each task, works for you – as many people have pointed out, work often expands to fill the time available:

I have had many days in the past where my only job for the day was to write an article about ‘X’ and that’s exactly how long it would take; all day. … [Using a timetable] The two guest posts I managed to write were both high quality and exceeded 1,000 words. I even had 20 minutes to spare after the first one so caught up with Google Reader and checked out Twitter. By giving myself just an hour to work on something, I naturally cut out all distractions and just get started.

(Glen Allsopp, Back to Basics: I’m Now Using Timetables, PluginID)

Setting time boundaries applies doubly to any projects you’re undertaking which don’t have any obvious finish line: a blog is one, a small business is another. There will always be more work to do on these (until you quit them), so be disciplined about how much time you’re giving to them.

Limiting Your Task List

As well as limiting the number of goals and projects that you have on the go, you can limit what tasks you focus on each day. For sanity and a sense of progress, it’s often useful to let one or two projects sit idle for a day or a week: when it comes to my two big ongoing projects (my novel and this blog), I tend to work on one or the other on any given day.

Even so, my task list can start to look overwhelming. A quick way to cope is:

• Put a star (*) against the most important task in today’s list. Not the most urgent, but the one which you’ll most regret not doing.
• Put two stars (**) against the second most important.
• Put three stars (***) against the one thing that really has to be done today.

You could use numbers (1, 2, 3) rather than stars, if you prefer.

Now knock off those tasks, in order. Don’t move from number one until it’s done. Take a quick break to let your brain recover mid-way, if you need to.

If you’ve got more time, great! Repeat the process with the rest of your list. I don’t recommend ranking more than three tasks at a time, because it starts feeling overwhelming again.

The reason for doing the important stuff before the urgent stuff is because urgent stuff will still get done … even when you’re pushed for time towards the end of the day, even when unexpected interruptions have come up. Important stuff tends to get shoved to “tomorrow”.

Limiting Your Income

This one applies to freelancers and small-biz people: anyone whose income is variable and tied, more or less, to how much work they complete. One way to tell yourself “enough is enough” is to decide how much money you need to make.
That could mean that you turn down new gigs because you’ve got enough steady income. (I’m in that position at the moment. Not because I’m rolling in money, but because I’m making what I need, and I’d rather spend my time this year focusing on my MA, my fiction writing, and this blog.)

If you’re paid by the hour, you might give yourself a set number of “paid hours” to work each week.

You’re going to face the choice between earning more and having more time for other projects. Cutting back your spending and making sure that you’re spending your money on stuff that you really want is the best way to do this – and I’ve got a collection of tips on that in the free More For Your Money ebook (pdf, right-click to save to your computer).

Some Final Thoughts

There will always be more that you could do. The good news is that you get to choose whether you want to. That isn’t always easy: making yourself rest can require self-discipline.

Look on the bright side: you have an abundance of creative, exciting, meaningful things to do. The alternative – sitting around bored out of your skull – isn’t much fun, as any teenager knows.

How do you decide when you’ve done enough? If you don’t have any way of deciding, what would make sense for you? Limiting your projects? Setting a smaller task list? Stopping when you’ve worked for a certain number of hours? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this … I’m still getting to grips with telling myself when “enough is enough”.