You will build a working task system and empty your scattered lists into it.
You've read about open loops, the five steps and next actions. This is the session where you build the system. It takes most people around 40 minutes for the first pass, sometimes longer if there is a lot in their head. Do it in one sitting if you can, somewhere quiet, with your phone face down. Breaking it over several days usually means it never finishes.
You need your list of task locations from lesson 2.1, a pen and paper or a blank note, and access to your email and chat apps.
Choose a single place for tasks and a single calendar, and commit to them for a month. Don't spend this session comparing apps. Use something you already have if it works: the task app on your phone, a notes app, Microsoft To Do if your company uses Microsoft 365, or a paper notebook you will carry every day. Lesson 8.1 helps you check your choice later. Your calendar is most likely the one your workplace already uses.
In the task tool, create four lists: next actions, projects, waiting for and someday. If the tool supports it, a fifth called inbox. That is all the structure you need.
Allen calls this a mind sweep: writing down every open commitment you can think of, at work and at home, however small. Write fast, one item per line, without sorting or judging.
If you get stuck, walk through prompts. At work: each project, each client, each person you manage or report to, each meeting this week, anything you promised in a chat. At home: bills, family, health appointments, the flat, the car, renewals, gifts, travel, things to fix, things to buy, admin you have been avoiding. Then go through the places you listed in lesson 2.1 one by one: flagged emails, chat threads, sticky notes, the notebook. Copy every task out of them.
Expect a long list, often several dozen lines on a first sweep. People often feel lighter at this point, before anything has been done, simply because it is all on paper.
Now go down the list and decide what each item is, using the questions from lesson 2.2 and the next-action rule from lesson 2.3. Each item ends up in one of six places:
A next action on the next actions list, written as a visible physical step. A project on the projects list, written as an outcome, with its first next action added. A waiting-for item, with the person and the date. A calendar entry, if it must happen on a specific day or time. Someday, if you want to keep it but not commit to it now. Or the bin, if it no longer matters.
Use the two-minute rule as you go. Some items will take less time to do than to write down properly. Do them and cross them off.
Marcus, the operations team lead from module 1, did his sweep on a Sunday afternoon. Here are some of his items and where they went.
"Roster" became a project, "second person trained to cover the roster", with the next action "ask Siti on Thursday if she is willing to learn the roster". "Driver Rahim shift change" was a two-minute action: he messaged Rahim to confirm the new shift, updated the roster and crossed it off. "Forklift service" went on waiting for: "vendor, quote for annual forklift service, asked 3 Oct". "Appraisal form for Lina" went on the calendar for the Friday it was due, with a next action to "draft three comments on Lina's year". "Learn Python" went to someday. "Fix old volume report" went in the bin, since his manager had already said the simpler version was fine.
His count at the end: 31 next actions, 9 projects, 6 waiting-for items, 4 calendar entries and 11 someday items, from a sweep of 74 lines. The other 13 lines were either done on the spot or deleted.
Those are his numbers, and yours will look different.
This is the step people skip, and it is the one that makes the system trustworthy. Go back to every place on your lesson 2.1 list and empty it. Archive or delete old to-do notes. Clear the flags in your email once each flagged item has a next action in the new system. Take the sticky notes off the monitor. If you keep the old notebook, draw a line under the last page and write "moved to new system" so you don't go back to it.
Group chats cannot be emptied, but they can stop being lists. From now on, when someone asks you for something in a chat, you capture it in your task inbox before you reply "noted".
You have one task tool with four lists, each item on them written clearly. Every project has at least one next action. Your calendar holds only fixed commitments. The old lists are archived or deleted, so if anyone asks what you've agreed to do, there is one place to look.
Write down your own counts, the way Marcus did. They give you a baseline to compare against when you run your first weekly review in lesson 8.3. Now start the sweep, and keep going until nothing else comes to mind.
Complete a full mind sweep, process it into your new system, and record how many next actions and projects you end up with.
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