Just close it

In today's working environment, everyone needs to interface with another colleague or another department especially in a matrix organization which you don’t even know how many bosses you actually have unofficially. The problem is that with the advancement of technology, everything becomes faster but problems arrive at your knowledge faster than the solutions. Each problem, with the ideas of many people, have now multiple options of solving it, going around it, overcoming it and sometimes even postponing it.

If we are not careful, options will multiply by themselves and worse, each option will multiply into many sub-options and in less than days, you will have a web of possible solutions. Then each solution or sub-solution requires some form of effort to solve and that effort creates another set of conditions and solutions (refer to ‘Solving Solutions’ if you want more details). Suddenly, your world turns into a swampy mangrove in an Amazon jungle and you wade through the muddy water underneath and the thick bushes in front and above!!

For those who can say ‘well, I can let go my work during weekend, so it is not affecting me’, unfortunately you are not spared in your personal life too. All matters, if not careful, can create a web of options by itself if we leave it unattended.

So, the key to all this is to weed the unnecessary options at a very early stage so that it doesn’t turn into a jungle. That is why each matter MUST have a CLOSURE. As you close one option, you close with it all its sub-options and complications and what you see finally is a well-kept garden instead of a snake farm ( I call it snake farm when a person’s garden looks like an idle land with weeds and usually you will find snakes lurking)

There are many things we can close as fast as it opens but we don’t. Why? Maybe because we are greedy, trying to see if some better news will pop out. Often than not, it is because we have a fear of making the decision now subconsciously influenced by the scary part of ‘what if’. If I decide to buy the laptop here and now, what if another place sells it at an even better deal? We don’t notice that when we decide to ‘wait’, we could be spending 3 weekends trying to look for the best deal, only to realize that each laptop model has its unique features and suddenly your garden of options turns into a snake farm. Imagine if you have decided on the model, at least now it is a matter of 3 stores with the lowest price and you grab.

So, if you have a tendency of leaving multiple files open on your computer while working on a project, or those that have a long to do list, most likely you are not closing fast enough. Instead of making your to do list, why not make a ‘to close list’. What are the things you want to close today?

When I was young, my mother always cooked dinner at about 5.30pm and we would have finished dinner by 6pm. I asked her why that early and she gave a simple answer, "the earlier you eat, the earlier you are free". It makes sense because if we don’t have a closure for the dinner, you will then need to re-organize all your activities around it and that creates another set of options.

In short, just close it!