David Allen, the GTD guru has a great story on actionable todo lists from one of his workshop. This is a conversation with Jim, who was stuck on a task.
“Get a tune up for the car. Is this the next action? Not unless you walk around with wrench in hand, dressed for grease.”
Jim chuckled.
“Whats the next action?”
“I need to take the car to the garage. Hmm. That means I need to call the garage.”
“Do you have the number?”
“Damn it! I don’t. My friend Fred has it. I knew something was missing!”
Isn’t that often what happens to us? We know something is missing but we don’t know what it is.
Creating todo lists is murky business. We need to be able to keep asking ourselves what the next action is and simplifying it.
No wonder Alcoholic anonymous insists that the first step is just to go 24 hours without alcohol. Don’t worry about the rest. We take it action by action, step by step..
We have gradually been building up to this over the past few weeks of book learnings. The key concept is, of course, setting ourselves up for success by keeping our proposed actions simple and actionable. This story is another great example.
Here’s to creating doable to do lists this week!
A Learning a Day 