As part of PLANE’s month of gaming series, I mentioned briefly how the Cult of Done Manifesto had greatly improved my productivity and outlook on work/life. Reproduced here:

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

The salient points of the Manifesto, for me at least, are 4. & 5.

4. because it helps you overcome those moments of the fear of not knowing, the fear of failure, the feelings of not being up to the task or that someone else knows more or could do it better.

5. because it has helped overcome my Chrome tab addiction. Seriously, sometimes I would have the same 20 tabs open for a week. That’s not healthy. If you haven’t read or acted on those tabs within 7 days then you are not going to. Delete them. If it is a good idea it will find it’s way back to you.

I promise.