“I look at my to-do lists and somehow feel worse” is a common reaction of many people. Most written or mental to-do lists, though created and maintained as a worthy exercise, are merely descriptions of “stuck” areas and projects in their life, and are not an effective kick-start in getting them done. It’s because another level of decision-making and tracking is still required, even after we’ve captured the area or project that has our attention.
Once I worked with a very bright, very hardworking professional who had wound up overwhelmed and somewhat frozen by many of her large and ambiguous projects. This seems to be the rule more than the exception these days for most people we’ve coached. The problem was quite simply that every time she would remind herself of the project, she would feel like she had to sit down and do a detailed and intelligent project plan about it, to know what to do, to deal with it successfully.
Seldom do we have the time, energy, or opportunity to do that kind of thinking (project planning) in the heat of battle of day-to-day life. What we need to do is define the outcome we’re after (the “project”), and then decide the next physical, visible action that will move it forward. This is the simple but profoundly powerful outcome-to-action thinking of essential productivity. Perhaps your to-do list says “Q4 budget.” The outcome is “Q4 budget signed off by finance department.” The next action is “email Anne for last year’s template.”
What amazed my client was how quickly she could come up with the exactly appropriate (and easy to do) next action about the most ambiguous and sophisticated of projects. If we’re not sure what needs to be done, then there’s more information we need, and that’s invariably a call to make, an email to send, a meeting to set, a conversation to have, a website to surf, an AI question to pose, or a document to review.
Instead of freaking herself out every time she thought about a project, she now had an easy, obvious, and available thing to do to move it forward. She was stoked.
After attending one of our seminars, a senior manager at a large pharmaceutical company looked back at the to-do list she had brought in with her, saying “that was an amorphous blob of un-do-ability!”
No kidding.
The quote is good. However, the article only describes the front end of the process - clarification of projects into next actions. As a 20 year GTDer, this is portion is on autopilot for me (e.g. inbox -> 0, next actions defined, etc). The challenge is always "too many action items". Alleviating the "torture" (dissatisfaction) becomes all about continuous elimination of previously important projects and related actions.
ps. AI has helped significantly in all GTD phases, including getting more done. However, it can't compete with the human brain for ideating more things to do.