In the old days, work was self-evident. Fields were to be plowed, machines tooled, boxes packed, cows milked, crates moved. You knew what work had to be done--you could see it. It was clear when the work was finished, or not finished. Increasing your productivity was all about making the work process more efficient, or simply working harder or longer.

Now, for many of us, there are no edges to most of our projects. Most people that I know have at least half a dozen things they're trying to achieve or situations they'd like to improve right now, and even if they had the rest of their lives to try, they wouldn't be able to finish them to perfection. You're probably faced with the same dilemma.

- David Allen, Getting Things Done

This time of year, many of us, especially those of us who read business blogs like this one, spend a good bit of time thinking about our goals and what we plan to accomplish.  But as David Allen points out, simply finishing a project isn't as easy as perhaps it once was.  He goes on to explain that there seem to be two key driving factors behind this issue.  

• First, so many of our projects are judged not on completeness, but on quality.  How "good" can something be?  How "effective"?  It's hard to stop working on something and consider it successfully finished when there's really no ceiling to how high our expectations can be.
• Second, with the availability of information available through the internet, we can quickly and easily find an overwhelming amount of research, tips, blog posts, and more that can (theoretically) help us make these improvements.  So there is little out there telling us to "stop" and a whole lot of information pressuring us to continue.  Not only that, it's easy to build up unrealistic expectations for what we should be doing by seeing the vastness of what is possible (yes, Pinterest, you're on this list).

For these reasons, we don't often stand back like a figurative farmer and survey our field and reflect on a job done, but we tend to instead see improvements not made, other research pathways untaken, and everything we still have to do.  While there's not one simple solution to this, recognizing that it's happening is the first step.  The second one is to make sure our projects have SMART goals attached to them (click here to get a quick brain boost on SMART goals).  The more we focus on the S-M-T part of that process and we break our bigger goals into smaller action steps, the easier it is to define exactly what we will work on, how we will do it, and how long we will do it, so we can truly "check things off the list" and feel satisfied with what we have accomplished.

Best wishes for a happy and productive 2017!