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Originally Posted by bwb  "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 |
Thank you for your input, on this level I really think that I have a lot more projects than actions. This step of the processing is really overwhelming and a little depressing, but explains why lots of projects are not getting finished. I should process these types into a project, regardless of if any actions are associated, or weigh if it should be put on Someday/Maybe, especially if there are none, correct?
Interesting views so far...though I feel restless as I organize, as I have projects around my house I want to start, but I dont want to jump the gun.