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Keep What You Start: 50 Proven Findings from the Science of Focus and Follow-Through to Help You Stop Procrastinating and Finish More at Work
Paperback
Series: The Verified Brain, Book 2
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 27 2026
Pages: 164
Weight: 0.50
Height: 0.35 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
It's ten past six, and you can name nine things you touched today. You finished none of them.
Not because you were lazy. You have never once been lazy. You opened the deck, asked the budget question, drafted three sentences of the difficult email - real work, real attention, real hours out of a finite life - and every one of them is still sitting there, open, waiting for tomorrow.
That's the problem this book is about. Not having too much to do. Not closing anything.
Peter Roehwick spent six years in senior management across two companies, watching capable people end week after week in exactly this condition. So he did what everyone does: he read the productivity advice. And found that a startling amount of it was built on research that either didn't say what it was reported to say, or fell apart when other people checked.
Willpower isn't a tank that empties - twenty-three laboratories tested that on 2,141 people and found an effect of essentially zero. Interruptions don't cost you ten IQ points; that figure came from eight employees of a public-relations agency and was never published anywhere but a press release. Habits don't take twenty-one days; the actual study found a range of 18 to 254.
Keep What You Start is fifty findings that survived the checking.
Each one traces to research he went and read. Where the evidence is contested, he shows you both sides and leaves it unresolved - because it is unresolved. Where a famous number turned out to be untraceable, it's left out rather than repeated with a confident citation. Where he's recommending something no study measured, he says so in the first sentence.
The fifty findings are arranged around four moves that follow the arc of a working day:
ENTER - why beginning costs so much more than continuing, and the one sentence, written the night before, that roughly doubles your follow-through.
HOLD - what an interruption actually takes from you (it isn't minutes), why the notification you ignored still cost you, and why a lightly-booked day can contain no usable time at all.
RESET - the ten-minute nap that beats the thirty, why being off the clock isn't the same as being restored, and what a short night takes first, invisibly.
CLOSE - the least glamorous skill in professional life, and the one nobody teaches: defining done, killing what's dead, and getting things off your desk instead of onto it.
Underneath all four runs one number - your Finish Rate - and it takes four minutes a week to work out.
What this book will not do is transform you. The levers here are modest and honestly sized: a walk gives a small real lift; a nearer finish line pulls harder than a distant one; one deliberate abandonment on a Friday counts as a thing closed. Nobody here is promising you a different brain.
But modest levers applied fifty-two times a year are not a modest thing. One more thing closed per week is fifty-two things a year that are finished rather than in flight - banked instead of at risk.
If you've read enough confident advice that quietly didn't work, this is the one that shows you where it came from and lets you check.
Read the first ten findings and see how much of what you believed survives.
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