“What is the next thing that physically needs to happen for this to move forward?”
Next actions are hard to get right. If something was stuck on my to-do list for a while, usually the next action wasn’t quite immediate enough. Sometimes the answer is just ‘schedule 20 minutes at a specific point in the future to think about how to move forward.’
(Of course, sometimes the problem is that I don’t really want to do the list item. Then there’s a different set of questions to ask.)
It occurred to me that it could be neat to randomly choose an item from my GTD system and either do it that day or delete it (unless I could cite the specific external thing I was waiting for) the idea being that if I can’t get it done that day, it’s not sufficiently small and next-actiony. Has anyone done anything like this? Results?
I’ve heard other people mention this approvingly, but I don’t know if the actually did it. It’s on my list of things to try at some point, though.
This is probably what you meant, but it might be more productive (and slightly less Hard Mode) to be able to choose “do immediately, do never, or break up into subtasks” while you’re actually going through the list.
Also, there are some tasks that I actually do want to postpone because they’re not my comparative advantage (for example, it’s raining right now, so I want to postpone errands until later tonight when it stops). That’s prone to rationalization, so I’m not sure how a system could handle that, but it’s something to think about.
“What is the next thing that physically needs to happen for this to move forward?”
Next actions are hard to get right. If something was stuck on my to-do list for a while, usually the next action wasn’t quite immediate enough. Sometimes the answer is just ‘schedule 20 minutes at a specific point in the future to think about how to move forward.’
(Of course, sometimes the problem is that I don’t really want to do the list item. Then there’s a different set of questions to ask.)
It occurred to me that it could be neat to randomly choose an item from my GTD system and either do it that day or delete it (unless I could cite the specific external thing I was waiting for) the idea being that if I can’t get it done that day, it’s not sufficiently small and next-actiony. Has anyone done anything like this? Results?
I’ve heard other people mention this approvingly, but I don’t know if the actually did it. It’s on my list of things to try at some point, though.
This is probably what you meant, but it might be more productive (and slightly less Hard Mode) to be able to choose “do immediately, do never, or break up into subtasks” while you’re actually going through the list.
Also, there are some tasks that I actually do want to postpone because they’re not my comparative advantage (for example, it’s raining right now, so I want to postpone errands until later tonight when it stops). That’s prone to rationalization, so I’m not sure how a system could handle that, but it’s something to think about.