Personally I’m not talking about anything important that I “believe I should be working on” except work for my university course. Obviously this is important to me and I do believe I should be working on it, but it doesn’t seem like this is the type of thing you’re looking for—more like personal, aside-from-the-day-job tasks like the writing-a-novel example? Many people do have that sort of goal, I guess (I certainly do during breaks from uni), but there’s nothing to stop the goals being more everyday ones. My guess is that most people are talking about any work that has to be mostly self-motivated—that is, there’s no one standing over you threatening to fire you if you don’t get it done right now, or something similar.
Personally I’m not talking about anything important that I “believe I should be working on” except work for my university course. Obviously this is important to me and I do believe I should be working on it, but it doesn’t seem like this is the type of thing you’re looking for—more like personal, aside-from-the-day-job tasks like the writing-a-novel example? Many people do have that sort of goal, I guess (I certainly do during breaks from uni), but there’s nothing to stop the goals being more everyday ones. My guess is that most people are talking about any work that has to be mostly self-motivated—that is, there’s no one standing over you threatening to fire you if you don’t get it done right now, or something similar.