What I’ve Learned In One Minute…

Hi friend,

have been thinking a lot about being done. Not done in the dramatic sense, but that small feeling of closing a tab, finishing a task, wiping down a counter, or finally sitting down after you clean your room. Because if we are honest, you can clean your room until kingdom come. There is always something. One more drawer. One more corner. One more area that could be rearranged or improved.

And I started to realise that that same mindset has been leaking into the rest of my life. Especially now, when I feel like I have more on my plate than I can balance. These past few weeks felt like living inside an emergency room. Every time I solved one problem, another one came running in behind it. It made me realise that when you’re ambitious, your life becomes a long corridor of urgent things. Not everything is a crisis, but everything feels like one. And when everything feels important, you lose your sense of what being done even means.

But here’s the thing, in an emergency room, you can only deal with what is most important first, even if ten other things still need your attention. I didn’t treat my tasks like that and acted as if all ten emergencies must be fixed before I am allowed to feel done. But that mindset made me feel like I was always behind, even when I are worked the entire day.

That hit me hardest with this project I have been working on at my job. It is a huge design full of parts that only make sense once you see them together. And every day I catch myself zooming in, making small improvements, shifting a bracket, redrawing a feature and checking clearances. Five minutes becomes ten. Ten becomes twenty. And each time I fix something, I notice something else I could fix. It feels endless. But the deadline is still coming. And the truth is, the project will never be perfect. It will just reach a point where I have done what needs to be done.

So then how do you know when that point has arrived? How do you know you can stop?

That question took me back to something I used to do in university without thinking too deeply about it at the time. I had a cut off. Six in the evening. No matter what, I stopped studying. I closed my books, ate dinner, went to the gym, and called it a day. At the time I thought it was just discipline. But looking back, it was more than that. It gave me a moment in the day where I could say, “today is done” and it saved my consistency.

Now, when I look at how I work, especially this month, I realise I lost that. I sometimes spend a whole day working on something and still feel like I did nothing. Not because I was unproductive, but because I never defined what done meant before I started. And when you do not define it, the day drags on forever in your head.

TL:DR

You will never feel finished if you never define what finished means. Life gets busy, and everything starts feeling urgent, like an emergency room. But you cannot fix everything at once. You have to decide what enough looks like for today.

WINS & LESSONS

Win: I got to cook lunch for a church family this weekend, and it reminded me how much I love cooking. Sharing a taste of Botswana with them felt like a blessing.

Lesson: I have been learning a lot about vulnerability and what it really means to share it with the people I care about. It is uncomfortable, but I am grateful for it.

QFYT

When was the last time you stopped not because the work was perfect, but because you decided that what you’d done was enough?

Alright that's it from me.

In a bit,

Motheo