December 28, 2025- The gift of being done

If all a man’s faculties can be concentrated on one point, it will become a spike; a blunt object cannot penetrate an obstacle, it has to be sharpened, and then it can easily thrust its way through anything.

~Patanjali

We have so many things tugging at our attention all the time. All the people in our lives, our jobs, our hobbies, our interests, our electronic notifications – they all compete for our focus. Much of the time, they all lose. Our attention tends to bounce from one thing to another, creating a false appearance of multitasking. In reality, we are still doing only one thing at a time, but not for very long, and with limited focus.

What if we took all that attention, all that focus, all that power, and placed it on a single task? How great could we be at that one thing? How efficient could we be without distractions? How comfortable could our lives be with just a single item on our to do list?

Much of the time, when we are distracted, when we fragment our attention, it is by choice. We start five projects at the same time. We attempt to do this while also doing that. We do it all to ourselves.

Give yourself the gift of addressing one thing at a time. Give that one thing all your focus and all your energy. Treat it like the most important thing in your life. If you can finish it, finish it right now and give yourself the gift of being done. If it is something that must be done incrementally, you can still give yourself the gift of being done, for now. Practice focus, not distraction.