I’ve stumbled upon a new way of working that has been an immensely positive change. I think it’s pretty rare to find a small tweak that has such an outsized impact, but I legitimately feel like I’m flying through some pretty difficult work because of this tiny tweak to my personal task management system.
So, first, a bit of background. I don’t want to get into too much detail here — I don’t want to summarize all of Getting Things Done in order to explain the way I work! — so, in brief, there’s only really two things you need to understand about the way I work:
- Like many other people, I always have more things to do than time to do them.
- I keep a lot of lists: the things that I need to do that are next up, the things I might do (“maybe someday”), and a bunch of other lists for different ideas or projects.
As I get things done, I am constantly managing the state of my top-level todo list — adding, reframing, prioritizing this slice of what my next steps are.
Being productive is very highly influenced by feeling productive. If you’re in the right mood and have the right mindset, you can take something difficult or tedious and have fun doing it.
Here’s the problem that I was constantly dealing with: my list would be filled to the brim, and it would also have items on it that would completely sap my energy. These items would effectively poison the rest of my list, and I would have a hard time looking past those to get to the things I could action in the moment.
Let’s look at a toy example list. Let’s say this is my list of stuff that I must do soon:
- Run two miles
- Write and schedule report for Bartholomew
- Figure out cold fusion
- Go buy pie
As I look at this list, there are three items where the exact process for accomplishing the goal is abundantly clear. I know where my running shoes are, and I know what store I’d walk to to pick up some pie. And let’s say this report is in the same bucket of things that I have entirely figured out — maybe there’d be ten minutes of data collation involved, but I know the exact next steps involved, in the same way that I know where my running shoes are. All three of these tasks are read to execute — they might be difficult or physically demanding, but now it’s down to just doing them.
However, I do not know how to even start on this cold fusion problem. But I do know that it’s extremely important to figure out; I know the exact reason why I need to get it done. So, over the course of the day, I pop around this list, but “cold fusion” is there, lurking — it’s hard to look past, and it weighs on me, making it hard to look past this one item in order to get the other ones done.
This is obviously a silly example, but I’m sure you can think of things in your own life that are both relatively-urgent and vague. Maybe not as difficult as cold fusion, but items where the first step isn’t clear. And maybe you’re like me, and the majority of your work falls into this category.
What do you do?
Enter the vague list and the action list. You can call these whatever you want — I organize my todos with a text file, which has these two headers: “🧖🏻♂️ nebulous concepts which describe work I must do soon” and “👨🏻🔧 concrete, prioritized todos.”
You put the vague stuff on the vague list and the actions on the action list. That’s it! In the process of burning down your list, you look at the vague list, and you turn it into concrete tasks as you find out what the concrete tasks are.
For each of the vague items, your job is to discover the next step. Sometimes, the best action for a vague action is to schedule a conversation with someone to talk about it; other times, the only thing to do is to just set aside some time to think about that vague action. In that case, I just write something like “reach out to Ferguson to talk about cold fusion” or “spend 15 minutes thinking about cold fusion” on my action list. And then I do it!
I know this concept sounds simple, but I couldn’t find prior art for this style of personal task management. Though this slots cleanly into my personal implementation of Getting Things Done, it’s not the same as the workflow that Allen recommends; these are two distinct lists, with some overlap, but equal priority. All of the items on both of these lists must get done; the only difference is whether or not the next step is clear.
This was a tiny tweak to the way I approach tracking tasks, but I now feel like I’m absolutely blitzing through the stuff I want to do. By sequestering those vague, poorly-defined, impossible-seeming tasks, I stare them down when I’m ready, and am giving myself the space to find the gambits needed to make them easy to take on. My list of action items now flows without a hitch; I get on a roll and simply burn them down without having to switch into a different mode of problem solving.
