Of course, you must begin work to get anywhere, but if you already have multiple projects in progress, the most value is created by picking one and seeing it through. Completing something unlocks the benefits of all the effort you’ve invested. Successful people aren’t always those with the best ideas; instead, they often excel at turning good ideas into completed projects. A good idea fully executed is far more valuable than a brilliant idea languishing unfinished.

This doesn’t mean you must finish everything you start. If a project no longer merits the effort, admit it and move on. Don’t maintain a mental inventory of half-finished endeavors that you have no real intention of completing that stick around like ghosts haunting your mental attic. If you must abandon something, do it consciously. Sometimes it makes sense to push through to the end anyway—especially if you’re close to finishing and the cost of stopping outweighs the benefit you’ll gain from the completed work. For example, if you’re just months away from a college degree, the credential still holds substantial value even if your career goals have shifted.

When you plan with finishing in mind, it changes how you approach work. Instead of deferring all value until the very end, look for milestones that deliver interim benefits. A community college degree can serve as a useful checkpoint on the way to a four-year degree. A graduate program might offer certificates en route to a master’s, providing measurable value sooner. Authors sometimes publish chapters as blog posts, capturing immediate returns while working toward a book.

Now consider your own list of half-complete tasks. What can you finish right now? Focusing on completion transforms your previous efforts into tangible results of actual value.

One day, my great-grandmother noticed that one of her chickens wasn't doing well, so she put it in a coop to separate it from the other chickens and keep an eye on it. The following day, she saw that the unfortunate bird had died. When Fred came to work, she asked him to take care of it. "Fred," she said, "In the barn lot, you’ll find a chicken coop containing a dead chicken. Please take it out in the field and bury it."

No one saw Fred for the rest of the morning. Lunch came and went, but Fred never came back to the house. Finally, my great-grandmother got worried and sent someone to look for him. They found Fred in a nearby field, busily digging a massive hole that was going to be big enough to bury the entire 8x10 foot chicken coop that contained the single dead chicken.

After clarifying the requirements, my great-grandmother got the chicken buried without losing the entire coop. Fred was relieved he didn't have to finish digging the giant hole.

Now imagine that instead of telling Fred he only needed to bury the chicken–not the entire coop, my great-grandmother had continued to let him dig the oversized hole and decided the problem was how long it took to dig. Maybe she would have tried to get Fred a better shovel. Or perhaps she would have asked someone to help Fred. She might have even assembled an entire team of other farmhands to make the digging go faster. All of her efforts to speed up the excavation process would seem silly because no matter what she did to try to speed up the digging, it wouldn't have made the process of burying the chicken any more efficient.

While this is easy to notice when you run into a farmhand trying to bury the entire chicken coop, it is all too easy to miss when you are in the middle of trying to work through a dense list of tasks or doing your part of a complex process where you only have vague idea of how your work is being used.

Even with his years of farm experience, Fred was confused about what he was asked to do and what was actually needed. How often do we lose sight of (or not fully understand) the actual goal and waste hours of our time on work that accomplishes nothing?

The effort wasted across our economy doing unnecessary work is not insignificant. There is a difference between being productive and being busy, and we must be very careful to differentiate the former from the latter.

Subscribe now