What does “done” look like?

With most things that we work on, there is some end goal in sight.

Publish the website.

Mow the grass.

Run a marathon.

In some cases, though, there isn’t a “done” to be found. This blog is a great example of that, in that I have no end goal in mind. In most cases, though, clearly defining what “done” means is essential to actually getting there. As Brené Brown says, you should “paint done” to know what it looks like.

In his book “Effortless“, Greg McKeown simply says “The first step to Effortless Action is defining what “done” looks like.” He unpacks it further with:

“If you want to make something hard, indeed truly impossible, to complete, all you have to do is make the end goal as vague as possible.”

The reason for defining “done” is so that you know when to stop. For things like mowing the grass, it’s pretty easy to know when it’s done. For building and publishing a website, you never really finish it, so you need to have a clear picture of the initial goal so that you can actually hit publish for the first time.