I know I’m not the only one who makes a to-do list one day and then makes another to-do list the next day with all the “carry over” things that didn’t get completed the day before!
Every time I walk into the living room, I notice the old hook on the wall from a painting that once hung there. The painting lives elsewhere and I now like the blank wall but the hook is still there. All it needs is a little moment with a claw hammer and it would no longer be there, and more importantly—I’d no longer think about it.
There’s also the plant in the corner that I keep meaning to re-pot. And my car needs new tires. The burned out light bulb in the hallway. That thank you note I should have written three weeks ago. That bag of stuff that needs to go to the donation center. All those unread emails.
Seems like a to-do list of trite things to write about? Yes, and no.
You see, everything in our sphere has an energetic pull. Every single time I walk in the door and see the old hook on the wall, my mind tracks it as something incomplete, and thus, it still needs my attention. There’s literally an energetic tether to that incomplete thing every time I look at it. When you add up all the incomplete things your mind is constantly tracking, they’re no longer so little. They take up a lot of energetic real estate in our brains.
This concept of “incomplete cycles of action” was something I learned while working on my Masters at the University of Santa Monica, and I now see the immense value of this teaching. I now refer to them as ICAs. We don’t ever truly get rid of all the ICAs because, well, life just keeps life-ing. But I have noticed that when I set aside time to handle the ICAs around me, I feel calmer and have more ability to focus on other things. I honestly feel like I get that mental real estate back and my brain stops tracking all the incomplete things and instead gets to work on new ideas—and that shift is no small thing!
If you don’t believe me (or if you do), run an experiment on your own ICAs and see what you feel like afterwards.
Here is my personal process:
- I make a giant list of ICAs. Before you even begin this, it’s important to set an intention to not go into overwhelm because it will quickly become a longer and more annoying list that you are currently imagining.
- Take a breath. Think about how good you’re going to feel when some of these things are handled and your mind is no longer tracking them as “incomplete.”
- It’s important to know in advance that you will rarely ever complete everything on your list. As I wrote above, life will keep life-ing and more things will arrive on the list regularly. Have some grace and humor about it all.
- Make a list of ICAs. Do it stream of consciousness with no specific order. Just get it all on paper.
- Next, set aside a small amount of time—say 10 minutes—that you are going to dedicate right now to doing something on that list for just 10 minutes.
- Scan the list and find the low-hanging fruit. In a few minutes, you can get that hook off the wall. You probably can’t respond to all the unread emails in that short of time. So, start with the easiest stuff. Set a timer and just knock out the easy stuff. Do the thing(s).
- Congratulate yourself for your achievement, even if it seems like a ridiculously small achievement. It doesn’t matter if it’s just removing a hook from the wall. You have just freed yourself from ever thinking about that darn hook ever again!
- You might find yourself loving the sense of accomplishment and feel inspired to go for more than 10 minutes—awesome.
- The trick here is to just start chipping away at the seemingly insignificant incomplete cycles of action, and give yourself the little dopamine hit from the completion.
- Once you get in the swing of this by doing the smaller ICAs, you will then come to the ones like the unread emails or the taxes. For this, it is important that you schedule time on your calendar to get it done, and stick to that schedule. Perhaps once a week on a Monday night, you allocate one hour to your ICAs. It’s amazing what you can get done in that one focused hour. If you find it hard to focus, time blocking and deadlines are massively helpful for getting things done that you aren’t excited to do. Body doubling with a friend can also be incredibly helpful here.
The most important thing to remember with these incomplete cycles of action is that they are robbing you of your mental energy and this IS something you can do something about. I encourage you to run a brief experiment on this and see how it goes for you. See how much lighter you feel when you can cross off those ICAs from your life! We would love to hear from you if you decide to try it out! Let us know how it goes.
