Closing the Loop

In a typical work week, I spend much of my time “closing loops”, “circling back”, and “completing circles”. Functionally, this means I follow up on pending tasks and ensure their completion. Bringing jobs over the finish line builds goodwill with customers and creates a sense of workplace harmony and balance. As a bonus, the customer’s happy and I feel self-actualized and relieved.

If a simple task is completed in one or two days, I feel I’m achieving professional excellence. If it takes a week or two, I know I’ve succeeded with, maybe, a slight sense of flakiness. After a month, I start to feel like a plumber plugging a leak in a house submerged in water. Though a path to completion exists, success looks distant and I wonder if the whole thing should be scrapped.

In life, there’s something about the trajectory of unease that accompanies unfinished work. With time, the unease morphs into mental clutter. Sometimes, mental clutter overlaps physical clutter or vice versa, resulting in anxiety and inertia. With even more time, negative feelings compound. We see evidence of this in the soaring popularity of Marie Kondo and the “tidying” trend. Watching Kondo work her magic reminds us how great we feel when we finish long-standing to-dos. We realize how any unfinished business manifests emotionally and spiritually. And, when we finish and let go, we often wonder what took us so long.

Last month, I began closing one of the widest, longest loops of my life. I delivered a “damn-near final” draft of “White Knuckle Birthday” (WKB), a comic I began writing in 2009. Though a few dialogue edits remain, the script is essentially done. The artwork looks exceptional and the project has picked up tremendous momentum. It appears we may even publish our graphic novel by year’s end.

While I’m incredibly thankful and excited for the end product, the personal growth and mental shift are also immeasurable. Even if work balloons way over budget and takes 5 times as long as planned, when it’s done, everything else falls away. One may feel like a schmuck while status updates continually reveal a glaring productivity vacuum, but it doesn’t matter. It will hurt for only a little while. Even if the little while becomes a long while. Finishing will bring freedom. The freedom to assess what was learned, what went well, and what might go better next time. Looking back, the waiting was painful, but the end product and sense of self-actualization will linger long after the delay is forgotten.