Most professionals are trained to start work. Very few are trained to end it.
The skill at the center here is termination judgment: knowing when a task, project, or process has delivered its maximum value—and should stop.
In many organizations, work continues not because it is useful, but because it exists. Reports are produced because they always have been. Meetings repeat themselves with slightly different slides. Projects drag on long after the original problem has disappeared.
This happens because stopping work feels risky. Ending something requires justification. Continuing rarely does.
As a result, teams waste attention, energy, and talent on activities that no longer matter. The cost is not only time—it is cognitive bandwidth. People become busy instead of effective.
High-performing organizations treat stopping as a skill. They review work with one core question: “If this did not exist today, would we create it again?”
If the answer is no, the work should end—cleanly, deliberately, without guilt.
The ability to end work at the right moment is what creates space for better work to begin.
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