Habit: Break Tasks Down into Actionable Steps
It’s pretty common to see something like “Johnny’s birthday” on a person’s to-do list. The good thing here is that you wrote the task down and you continued with whatever else you were working on. But, at some point, you are going to have to think through what is actually involved with getting “Johnny’s birthday” done. Often these “undefined tasks” require some thought to break them down. That can cause procrastination. But, having a system that makes it easy to break tasks down can remove the initial stumbling block.
WHAT’S THE NEXT ACTION
There is a great tactic described in David Allen’s book Getting Things Done that is a big help with undefined tasks. You should ask yourself: What is the next action that I could take that would move this thing closer to done? Just defining a single actionable step can help to start a task rolling. In the case of the birthday example, this could mean calling Johnny’s favorite facility to see what dates they have available for a birthday party. Once you have that broken out, you can add it to your Day Planner and get it done. And, once that first action is done, other sub-tasks will start to make themselves apparent.
SUB-TASKS IN DAILYBALANCE
The Master List allows you to break any task down into as many levels of sub-tasks as you need. Sub-tasks can be added to the Day Planner without having to add the entire project. This lets you plan individual steps during your day alongside everything else you need to get done.
DailyBalance gives you a really easy way to employ this strategy and make a habit of attacking undefined tasks without the stress and procrastination.