Ever been to those expensive cafes where you can try a bit of each cake before deciding which one to go for? No, me neither, but I wish they did the same with beer… That said, it is a very effective technique fore task management.
Very rarely are things that need doing truly one task – they are usually ‘Projects’ in the GTD sense. For example, you may have to review the marketing plan for your product. You can just throw it onto your to do list if you want. You might even split it into ‘print marketing plan off’, ‘read marketing plan’, and ‘feed comments back to marketing’. And that is fine. But sometimes you can be a bit more effective.
Another approach you see, is to spend just 5 minutes starting the task to see what happens. Taste test it. You might see the following:
- The plan was only 2 paragraphs and was fine so the task is now done;
- The plan isn’t on the server so you’ll have to e-mail marketing to get it;
- The plan hasn’t actually been written yet so you need to get that done;
- The plan is to spend 10 times the proposed budget and is thus useless; etc etc etc
All these things it is great to know now, rather than find out the day you need to finalise it. But beyond that, I find a lot of things that come across my desk are pretty vague in nature – ‘sort this’ or ‘understand that’, and as such, if I just put them on my to do list they sit there looking intimidating and get put off. But five minutes kicking their tires and I can usually work out exactly what I need to achieve, what I need to do it, and any thing I need to pull in advance of the work I am planning to do. This is a fantastic pre-emptive strike. Give it a go!
