Quote:
Originally Posted by Lucas  For instance "become a better cook" is in my inbox, and that IS actionable, but it is not doable in two minutes, so I defer it into my organizational system...since becoming a cook will probably take more that 2 steps, would I turn that into a project all its own? I feel as though I am going to have hundreds of projects then...and that is probably ok now that I have a system to manage it...right? |
"Become a better cook" may be something you want to do, and have the time and resources to do now, but as a statement, it's not actionable. You can't just will yourself to be a better cook. Your actions should include a concrete, physical, action verb. What you've got so far is a project.
What's your plan for becoming a better cook? Do you need some cookbooks? Enter "browse Amazon.com (or local bookstore) for good cookbooks". Do you want to take a class? Write down "research cooking classes on the Internet". Do you need more practice, because you're not in the habit of cooking for yourself. Write down: "1. Choose a meal to create from a cookbook (or imagine something that you want to create). 2. Make a shopping list for this meal. 3. Go to the grocery store. 4. Cook it!"
An action is something you should just be able to DO, without really having to think about it. One technique that I like to use to make sure I'm getting my actions down from the "ouch, hurts to think" level to the "that's so easy I can't believe I didn't already do it" level is to write them out as if I had a personal assistant who was going to do them for me. This forces me to think out all the little details and make all the decisions upfront and prevents me from hitting a mental roadblock later when I'm in "doing mode" instead of "thinking mode".
And yes, it's okay to have dozens or even a hundred projects. It'll probably seem a little overwhelming, but now that you have all of this stuff out of your head, you can start to look at all of it as a whole and decide what's really important to you. A lot of your projects you'll probably want to defer until you've made progress on the ones most important to you. Many more you'll probably realize that you've ALREADY deferred mentally, because you haven't made any headway on them in weeks. So now you can ask yourself why it got deferred or stuck, and either deliberately stick it on your Someday/Maybe list or get it going again by putting it on your active projects list and coming up with the next concrete action.
-Brian