The Weight of Unfinished Business

Power Connectors

Oct 1

3 min read

There’s probably something you’ve been meaning to do. An email you haven’t answered. A conversation you keep putting off. A project you were excited about until it got complicated. Someone you said you’d call. An idea sitting half-finished in a notebook, a Google Doc, or somewhere in the back of your brain.

You’re not working on it right now, but somehow, it’s still taking up space. That’s the annoying thing about unfinished business. It doesn’t have to be actively demanding your attention to keep getting it.

We tend to think of unfinished things as items on a to-do list: finish the project, make the call, send the proposal, schedule the meeting. But some of the heaviest unfinished business isn’t something you can check off quite that easily. It’s the conversation you know needs to happen. The person you genuinely meant to reconnect with. The opportunity you were going to pursue when you “had more time.” The decision you keep telling yourself you’ll make when you have more time to think about it.

Individually, none of those things seems particularly significant. Stack enough of them together, though, and they become a surprising amount of mental baggage.

The Stuff We Keep Moving to Tomorrow

I use the phrase “eat the frog” all the time. The frog is that thing you know you need to do and absolutely do not want to do. So you put it on today’s list. Then tomorrow’s. Then next week’s. Eventually, moving the frog around becomes its own recurring task, which is a pretty impressive amount of work dedicated to not doing one thing.

And the frog rarely gets better with age. The email gets more awkward to answer. The conversation gets harder to start. The little problem you could have dealt with three weeks ago develops accessories. Meanwhile, it keeps popping into your head at inconvenient times, reminding you that it’s still there.

At some point, avoiding the thing becomes more exhausting than doing the thing. So eat the damn frog. Send the email. Make the phone call. Have the uncomfortable conversation. Finish the thing that’s 80 percent done instead of starting something new because starting is more fun.

Good Intentions Don’t Close Loops

Not all unfinished business is something we’ve been deliberately avoiding. Sometimes life just gets busy. We say, “I’ll send you that.” We meet someone and immediately think of the perfect person to introduce them to. We have a great conversation and genuinely intend to follow up. We tell someone, “We should do something with that.”

And we mean it. Then Tuesday happens.

A week later, the business card is still sitting on the desk. The introduction never happened. The great idea is buried under twelve newer ones, and both people have moved on to whatever demanded their attention next. Nobody did anything wrong. But nothing happened, either.

Maybe that’s what makes unfinished business worth paying attention to. It isn’t always one big, looming thing. More often, it’s a collection of small things we genuinely intended to do that quietly got pushed aside. And most of them probably wouldn’t take nearly as much from us as we’ve already spent thinking about them.

There’s probably one that came to mind while you were reading this.

Funny how the frog always knows its name.

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