You will be able to rewrite vague tasks as next actions you could start without thinking.
Look at any to-do list that has been around for a few weeks and you will find items that never move. "Tax." "Mum's birthday." "Website." "Sort out insurance." They sit at the top, they sit at the bottom, they get copied onto next week's page, and every time you read them you feel a small drop in mood and move on to something easier.
Those items are stuck for a reason, and the reason is not laziness. Each one hides a decision you haven't made yet. This lesson shows you how to make the decision once, so the item turns into something you can just do.
Read "tax" on your list and your brain has to work out what it means before it can act. Is it filing? Is it finding last year's documents? Is it checking whether you can claim relief for your parents? Do you need to ask someone first? That thinking takes effort, and the moment you read the item is usually a moment when you have a few minutes between other things and no appetite for effort. So you skip it, and next time the same thinking is waiting.
Your list then becomes a list of reminders that something needs thinking about, rather than a list of things to do. David Allen's point in Getting Things Done is that the thinking should happen once, when you clarify the item, and what you write down should be the result of that thinking.
Allen's fix is to write every task as the next action: the next visible, physical thing you would do to move it forward. Visible and physical means you could picture someone doing it. Typing an email, making a call, opening a file, buying a card, walking to a colleague's desk.
Take "tax". If what you are waiting on is your sister's receipts for the course fees she paid for you, the next action is "email Jia Hui to ask for the 2025 receipts". That task has a verb, a person and an object. You could do it in a lift.
Take "Mum's birthday". The next action might be "WhatsApp Uncle Kevin to ask if he's joining dinner on the 14th" or "book a table for six at the restaurant in Tiong Bahru". Either is something you could start without thinking.
A useful test: if you saw the task on your list with five minutes free and a phone in your hand, could you start it right away? If the honest answer is "first I'd have to figure out...", what you'd have to figure out is the real next action. Sometimes it is "decide whether to file myself or use an agent", and that is fine. A decision can be a next action as long as it is written as one.
Context helps too. Allen suggests grouping next actions by where you can do them: calls, at computer, errands, at office. You don't need that on day one, but if your list grows long, it lets you see the five things you can do while waiting at the clinic instead of fifty you can't.
Some items, once you think about them, take more than one action to finish. "Website" might mean choosing a platform, writing the text, getting photos and launching. Allen calls any outcome that needs more than one action a project, even if it is small. "Mum's birthday dinner" is a project. So is "renew passport", which is at least a form, a photo and a collection.
Keep projects on their own list, written as outcomes: "Mum's birthday dinner booked and confirmed", "website live with three pages". Then make sure every project has at least one next action on your next actions list. A project with no next action is the same stuck item you started with, just better labelled.
When Marcus, the operations team lead, rewrote his list, "roster" turned out to be a project: "second person trained to cover the roster". Its first next action was "ask Siti on Thursday if she is willing to learn the roster".
While you clarify, one more rule saves a lot of list-writing. Allen's two-minute rule says that if the next action takes less than two minutes, do it now, while you are clarifying. Replying "yes, 3pm works" to an email takes less time than writing it on a list and reading it again later.
The rule applies during clarifying, not as a reason to drop your planned work every time something small comes up. If you are in the middle of a focused block, anything that arrives waits for your next processing session. Lessons 4.2 and 5.2 come back to this.
Here is part of Priya's list from the last lesson, rewritten.
"Claim" became "submit taxi claim in the expense system with the receipt photo". "Agency" became a project, "year-end campaign visuals approved", with the next action "email Farah at the agency with feedback on the three draft visuals". "Analytics course" became "watch module 3 videos, Thursday 8pm", which also earned a slot on the calendar. "Gym" became "book Saturday 9am class in the app".
None of these took long to write. Each saved a little thinking every time she looked at the list, and that is what makes a list something you are willing to look at.
Your own list probably has a few items like "tax" on it. In the activity, you'll rewrite ten of them and find out which ones are really projects.
Rewrite ten tasks from your current list as next actions, and mark which of them are really projects.
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