What to do right now? How to engage your next action

seedling

planted Aug 16, 2021

Trust your intuition to decide what task to engage in. If you are not sure, decide by context time, energy and priority.

After organizing all your projects and having a list of next actions, the last part of (getting things done )[five-steps-of-getting-things-done] is to really engage and decide what to do at what given time. How do you work through your list?

You probably have organized them by context, but you will probably have a lot of tasks at the given context. So what to do?

Trust your intuition

The more experienced you get, the easier it is for you to decide which task is the most relevant at the time and which one is doable right now.

But to help you find the right task, here are 4 criteria to choose the best suiting task for the moment:

1. Context

• Where are you?
• Do you have the tools/person at hand?

2. Time available

• How much does each task take?
• How much time do you have right now?

3. Energy available

• Do you have the energy to tackle a huge task?
• If you are exhausted, get an easy win by doing easy things that you still need to do anyway

4. Priority

• Which task is the most urgent and important one?

You should look at these criteria in this order. A task can be super important and have top priority, but if you don't have enough time or energy or simply are not at the correct place, you can't do it.