Think of that one big item on your to-do list. Yes, that one. The one that constantly gets put off “until tomorrow”—and tomorrow never, ever seems to come.
One of my clients is a writer, and before she started with my PROtivity System, her productivity was all over the place.
When it came to small projects—blog posts, news articles, etc.—she had no problem getting them done. But when it came to large projects like her novel, they seemed to always get pushed to the bottom of the pile.
She kept putting projects—even huge ones, like “revise novel”—on her to-do list. Every time she saw the line item, she would stop and think about all the actions needed to complete it.
Completely overwhelmed, her brain would protest, and her palms started to sweat. She thought to herself, “I don’t have time to do that right now!” And she’d move on to the next item and never make progress on her novel, even though it was something she was really passionate about, something she dreamed of doing since she was very young.
A Breakthrough Moment
The first step for this writer was to recognize the difference between projects and tasks.
A lot of people use “project” and “task” interchangeably, but they are not interchangeable. David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, defines a project as anything that takes more than one action.
When you think about it from this perspective, you can’t actually do a project, you can only do tasks.
The Solution for Getting your Projects on your To-do List
Instead of adding projects to your to-do list, make a separate list of projects.
Be sure to maintain this list in a place that you will check at least weekly to be certain none of the important projects are being neglected.
For each project, ask yourself two questions:
1. What does done look like?
2. What is the very next physical activity I need to do to move this project forward? Is it a phone call, some research, maybe an email, something else?
That’s something you can do—that’s a task.
Put that task on your to-do list. Once that task is complete, then you can look back at your project list and decide on the very next action to continue to make progress toward your goal. Then add that task to your to-do list, and so on.
Slowly, but surely, you’ll make progress, and your projects will be complete.
The Bottom Line
It’s easy to become overwhelmed by the number and size of the projects on a to-do list. For the writer I worked with, this meant never making progress on the novel that meant so much to her.
After recognizing the difference between projects and tasks, she was able to break down the “revise novel” project into smaller, simpler tasks: “print out current draft,” “annotate chapter one with revision notes,” “edit chapter one,” etc. With this new approach, she was finally able to move forward.
Dividing projects into tasks makes the next action clearer and more straightforward. With just a simple shift in approach, you can make more consistent progress on the projects that mean the most to you.
Please let me know if this is helpful by commenting below.
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