The best idea in the universe came to me on a Saturday afternoon this past July. I was sitting here at the computer, working on my monthly newsletter (which goes out about every 45 days), when I had a marketing brainstorm that almost knocked me out of my chair.

M&Ms! Customized M&Ms! I would put my cartoon head on candy and put it in a cute tin and add a raffia bow with a little handmade card! Yeah… and I would send it to people. Lots of people. And I would write a clever note like, “Well, I wouldn’t call this a bribe, exactly, but….”

Yeah! What a brilliant marketing idea to get me noticed! As I struggled to make sure my face on the M&M would not make my cheeks look more pudgy, I located and ordered the cute little tins with the clear tops so people could immediately see the custom M&Ms.

I was so excited when the tins arrived that I opened them in the post office.

Then I put them in the trunk.

And there they stayed.

Last week — last week – I removed the box from the trunk of my Miata. I never did order the M&Ms. The box took up about a third of the trunk, and since July each time I popped it open for groceries, I felt THE GUILT. Oof, that project. Yeah. Should have followed through. That’s a lot of guilt.

The reasons I didn’t finish the job (too expensive, not clear to whom I should send them, scared of having people eat my heads) don’t matter as much in this post as THE GUILT about not finishing. As small business owners, we have plenty to worry about. Will the check make it into the bank before the rent comes out? Did I save enough for taxes? Am I going to make the deadline? Did I meet the client’s expectations?

Adding guilt about unfinished projects is a complete waste of time. But we do it all the time. We have these great ideas that we can’t get around to, and we feel frustrated or guilty when we think of them. “Ugh — yeah… we really need to do that still.” We think we don’t have the time to get them done, but we waste the energy feeling guilty about not getting them done.

One of my favorite productivity gurus is Troy Malone from Pelotonics (a group productivity website). Troy has embraced David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and Troy tells me that David tells him that THE GUILT keeps us from being productive. Instead of having these little niggling unfinished tasks in our head, we need to create a plan to get them done or to forget about them or to hand them off to someone else. The more little feelings of guilt we have about things left undone, the less we can manage the tasks we have in front of us.

So, I’m going to stop beating myself up over not making the M&Ms with my cartoon on them. It’s still a brilliant idea, of course, and perhaps the perfect opportunity will come up. But I’m going to stop feeling guilty. I’m also going to stop worrying about the bag full of picture frames I bought to create the perfect white board for my to do lists (no, really — this was a great idea!). And I’m going to hide the blank digital picture frame where I never uploaded my nephews’ pictures, and the empty organizer where I never filed my 2008 tax receipts. These things don’t really matter here at Avenue Z, and I’m tired of wasting time worrying about them.

Happy New Year.