My favorite story about someone getting stuck on "next steps" involves Drew Carey (yes, the Drew Carey, the comedian and actor). Carey hired David Allen to solve his own productivity problems. His story, published in the popular psychology book " Willpower ," is this:
As he looked through the papers, unanswered emails, and unfinished tasks in his computer and head, he mapped them to dozens of personal and business projects. This is typical: Allen's clients typically have between thirty and a hundred projects, each with multiple tasks that take a day or two to sort through, organize, and process. After identifying the projects, Carey had to identify a concrete next step for each one... While Carey was plowing through his stuff, Allen sat in his office all day. "He actually sat there and watched me work through my emails," Carey says. "Whenever I got stuck , he would ask me, 'What's going on?' And when I told him, he would say, 'Do this.' And I would do that. He was totally decisive. Only a few times did he say, 'You can do this or that. ...
If the thought of the hundred projects you have to break down into steps doesn't make you new zealand telegram data shudder, you haven't looked closely enough. Even this simple blog post required 16 different tasks, and as Carey suggests above, it's easy to get bogged down trying to figure out what the next task should be.
If you use Getting Things Done correctly, identifying the next steps is actually the hardest part of the whole system. It's easy to be tempted to take a shortcut. For example, I used GTD to (successfully!) quit smoking. But I failed on the first attempt.
Why?
My task was:
“Quit smoking”.
Since the only thing on my list was actually doing nothing , I initially assumed that quitting smoking would be a single task, one that required a lot of willpower but could be accomplished in a day.