This is Stephen Robbins. Welcome to the Get It Done Guys quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

Now usually we open up our year with a lot of kicking things off, but today's episode is about

the opposite. It's about finishing things up. Research tells us that when we don't complete something,

our brain remembers it so that we can finish it later. But our storage isn't endless. We fill up with incomplete things, and eventually our minds

crack under the strain. I mean, we've all had it happen, trying to keep track of one more thing,

and we just lose it. We go off the deep end and we start wearing nothing but body paint to business

meetings. That isn't just me, right? Right? We'd like to ditch this mental clutter and return to a bliss-like state of Zen. We want to be an assented master,

levitating above the fray of it all, as our millions of followers donate their life-savings for our fleet of Pink Rolls Royces.

Fortunately, of course, we are spiritually unattached to all of it, but we have to accept the donations, for their sake.

We can, however, clear our minds and our lives by simply closing the loops of our unfinished work.

Close your communication loops.

Now, awkward phone calls are the worst.

So, we put them off for days and weeks and months and years, whether it's letting a

loved one know about a lost relative, or telling your schmooopy the cat got sucked into the

gutter, ate a radioactive mouse, and turned into a gigantic flesh-eating feline tower

of terror again.

There are always going to be phone calls that we'd rather not make.

But we still think about them

in the back of our mind. And the solution here is really simple. Act now. The phone call won't place

itself, but it does need to happen. And at some point, you will be making it. It might as well be now.

So rather than after you've imbibed a fifth of gin trying to work up the courage, just do it.

There's never a perfect way to share bad news, but once you've picked up the phone,

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