STPStartingSTRTStopping^®Stop Starting, Start Stopping: The Antidote to Addition Addiction — a business book by Debbie Jenkins

The half-built course. The rebrand you paused. The newsletter that ran for six issues. The partnership that never quite began. You are not working on them. But you have not stopped them either. They remain on the mental inventory, waiting for a quieter week, a better plan or the person you apparently expect to become after Christmas.

Some cost you subscriptions. Others cost you another conversation about whether to revive them. All compete with the work you have actually chosen to do.

In this book, I call it Complexity Debt: the accumulated cost of keeping unnecessary commitments alive. Doing nothing about them is not the same as paying nothing for them. You do not have to finish everything you started. You do have to decide what still deserves a place.

You do not have a productivity problem. You have a stopping problem.

I met Steve on a plane from Scotland to Birmingham. He was overflowing the middle seat in a Metallica-slash-Sticky-Vicky T-shirt, drinking warm lager. I had the window seat, a laptop full of plans and a life that looked brilliant on paper. Somewhere over the Pennines, this stranger from Wolverhampton asked the questions I had been avoiding for two years.

“If the rest of your life started when this plane lands, what would you keep? What would you bin?”

I was being lectured on Roman philosophy, at altitude, by a man in a Sticky Vicky T-shirt. And he was right. Steve became my friend, my conscience and the voice that interrupts my most impressive excuses. The flesh-and-blood Steve is real. The one in these pages is the version that took up residence in my head. He turns up throughout the book, mostly uninvited. Between his interruptions, you’ll find my stories, practical Stop/Start pairs and questions to apply to your own business. You don’t need to become Steve. You might need someone who asks you what he asked me:

“Ask what you’re never going to do again.”