Fresh Focus On Productivity!™

Welcome back!

We’ve discussed before in posts related to the weekly review about charting your accomplishments. But for some of you, I’m sure that getting started on chronicling your accomplishments and improvements has and is a challenge. So let’s talk about what we can do to start! We can start a Completion Journal.

As we go through life, we complete many things in many different contexts and areas of our life. It’s impossible to remember all of what we’ve accomplished. But I think it’s really important to chronicle those things in life. And not just for ourselves, but for our relatives that come after us.

My grandmother came over from Poland when she was eight and had witnessed some of the Holocaust. Before she died, we had talked many times of what it was like for her early in her life, both in Poland and after she came via boat to the USA. But I really wish that I had something more detailed: I would have loved to have The Completion Journal of her life. And this would be easy to do: just watch how!

Using Gmail, GTDInbox, or your own preferred action item tracking tool it’s very easy to implement The Completion Journal. There is a tag in GTDInbox that is called “Finished” as I am sure that there is in whatever you use to track your action items. Obviously, everything that you finish gets labeled with this tag. Once weekly, pick one monumental thing that you’ve completed (even if you think it’s trivial, the people that will read your Completion Journal will not) and put it in a separate document. It can be handwritten, an office document on Google Docs or another way to chronicle that strikes your fancy. Using FireFox and gDocsBar, using Google Docs would be a cinch! Using Microsoft OneNote 2007, you can print the page and “Send to OneNote”. There are many different ways to do it.

At the end of a year, you will have 52 items that you have successfully completed, hand-picked by you to include because you were so proud of getting them accomplished. Can you imagine what a legacy this would leave for your family? Any family member would be honored and cherish a journal such as this.

This style of The Completion Journal is the grander scheme of things – but when doing this, you also get to see all the things that you’ve completed that you might consider “mundane”. No matter how mundane you think it to be, anything that has been completed is worthy of a pat on the back. Congratulate yourself for knowing what you need to do, doing it, and reveling in your accomplishments. Always praise yourself for a job well done: what you think and feel about yourself is the most important opinion of all!

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