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In this post, we are talking about a comprehensive system that will help you to be more productive while breaking the cycle of procrastination and overwhelm we so often feel due to the constant barrage of tasks, responsibilities, and projects looming above us. This system is the Project Notebook, a simple, streamlined way of capturing tasks and developing the next actions to tackle everything from taking down the Christmas decorations to moving to a new house. This is part of our series on getting things done from a biblical perspective. Check out our shop for printables of the resources mentioned below.
The Tangled Web of a Never-ending Stream of Incomplete Tasks
When I was a little girl, I remember starring in our elementary school’s version of Charlotte’s Web. I can’t remember what I played. Maybe a sheep? Every little girl and boy is brought to tears as they remember Charlotte’s final moments. For many children, it’s their first brush with death.
I loved Charlotte’s Web, but I hated spiders. As a child, if I saw a spider, there was only one response: Scream. One day, I wanted to ride my bikes, which were stored in an outside storage closet. Upon closer inspection, I realized that there was a spider resting on the metal. Well, how was I supposed to ride that bike now? I actually took the hose and – much to my parent’s chagrin – started to hose down my bike in the storage closet simply to rid it of that spider.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that I hated spiders as a little girl. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to tolerate them and appreciate their purpose in God’s grand design.
Spiders definitely have their place in the imagination of our culture. From Charlotte’s Web, to Lord of the Rings, to Harry Potter, each story looks to the spider and sees something that transcends time. One of the most iconic elements of the spider is their web. “What a tangled web we weave,” wrote Sir Walter Scott. We’ve all experienced those moments when we have been trapped in a web of our own creation.
We are currently going through a series on the blog and on the podcast on getting things done from a godly perspective. In many ways, I think we look at the actions on our to-do lists as threads that are often tangled up as we jump from one hurried project to the next with no real plan, vision, or goal. We leave tasks incomplete and move unwittingly from place to place, weaving a tangled web for ourselves. Eventually, we are caught in this, and we feel trapped under the weight of expectations and responsibilities. We may try to alleviate the stress through self-medication and escape with technology. But, none of these actions actually lead to less stress because none get at the true nature of the problem.
What is the problem? We are pulled in so many different directions due to modern living and responsibilities, and our solution is often to procrastinate and do something that will give us a rush of dopamine at that moment.
What should the solution be? We need to slowly chip away at the things we need to do. We actually have to get stuff done. And, once we get the ball rolling in the right direction, we will begin to accomplish more and more. And the feeling of being trapped in a web of our own making will lessen. The Project Notebook is a great step in the direction of getting things done.
There was a study released recently that focused on the part of the brain that was essential in producing our willpower. When we need to do something that we would rather not do, we rely on our willpower to help us do that thing. We need willpower to check off items on our to-do list, have challenging conversations with our spouses, and navigate difficult decisions that help move us in the direction of our dreams. What the researchers found is that the area that controls willpower is like a muscle. It gets bigger – and our willpower gets stronger – when we use it to do difficult things. However, it also gets smaller when we put off doing those things, whether that’s through procrastination, paying someone else to do it, or just ignoring the problem altogether. Our society prizes happiness, comfort, and the feeling of safety and security above all else. When we do difficult things, we are doing things that might not make us feel happy, comfortable, or secure. This means that our society is ultimately working against us having strong willpower because we often avoid those tasks that will make our willpower stronger.
We are stuck in a loop: (1) Having too many tasks -> (2) Feeling stressed -> (3) Wanting to feel better, i.e. more happy, comfortable, and secure -> (4) Ignoring the tasks and procrastinating through self-medication (food, alcohol, technology, etc.) -> Only to wake up the next day and feel like we have too many tasks. So how do we break out of this loop? We have to start chipping away at the tasks that we have even if they are difficult and require much willpower to do.
If we think back to our analogy of the web, we often have a string of incomplete tasks, unfulfilled responsibilities, and pressing goals and dreams surrounding us. Every time we complete a task and move forward, we are unraveling the web and turning it into a straight path that helps us to go forward in the direction of our dreams and a life that we love. A life that brings glory to God.
Our goal then should be to start to unravel the web. But, how do we do this?
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How to Start Your Project Notebook
Before you can create your project notebook, you have to develop a comprehensive list of all the tasks you need to complete. The best course of action is to gather up all the tasks that make us feel trapped, whether those are recurring tasks that are best served through habits or goals and dreams that are one-time projects. We need to write all of these tasks down, determine which needs to actually be completed right now, and then for those tasks that are prioritized, we must determine the next action. The technical term for these tasks is Open Loops.
In this way, instead of swinging from project to project, action to action, with no real progress being made, you are instead moving in a linear point-to-point direction on each project or task.
(Obviously to the best of your ability, keeping in mind the type of task you’re dealing with and your life circumstances. As I take down my Christmas tree this week with two toddlers, it doesn’t necessarily feel like a linear progression, but I’m moving forward towards a clean home, which is what matters.)
The process of gathering up all of our incomplete tasks and projects that make up our web is called a brain dump, and our podcast this upcoming week is going to go through the process of how to tackle all of the items on your to-do list. Writing all of these things down can definitely lead to a feeling of overwhelm. What follows is my system for how to navigate these tasks so that the feeling of being overwhelmed is lessened and maybe done away with completely. If you follow this system, you can have less stress and more productivity in your life.
Be sure to check out our shop at https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/amblshop/ for printables of all of the following resources.
Your Action Lists in Depth
After we gather up all of our incomplete tasks and projects, we need to sort them out so we can determine what the next action is for all of them. This is the next step in untangling our web.
We sort out our tasks into four different lists. You can refer back to the book Getting Things Done by David Allen if you want to learn more about this process. These four task lists will be stored in our Project Notebook.
Category #1: Do Now
In this category, you should put all of the small tasks that you can accomplish in 5 minutes or less. This can include making phone calls, ordering small items to replace broken parts, or sending an email. (Truthfully, you don’t really need to write these things down unless it’s motivating for you to do so.) The goal is to get these things off your plate quickly.
Category #2: Waiting For
The next list should be things that you can’t act on because you are waiting for someone else’s actions. You can write them down along with the date you contacted them. For these tasks, “the ball is in the other person’s court.” So you don’t need to do anything. Writing the date beside the task is helpful if you need to check in later on for an update on how something is going.
Category #3: Next Actions
This is the task list that is the most substantive. This list basically holds all of your to-dos. Importantly, this task should be thought of as the next action you should take. This means that you shouldn’t just list a huge project down on your next actions list. Here’s the difference: A major project could be painting the bathroom. However, that isn’t really an easy manageable task. Instead, the next action could be: “Pick out shade for bathroom paint.” You’ve taken a larger project and figured out what the next step is.
For each project that you’ve accumulated in your inbox, you need to figure out the next action and add that action to your do now or next actions list.
If you do this, you can organize your tasks written on the list based on where the action has to get done to make it quicker and easier to refer back to the list and pick the perfect task to complete in this moment. Some different categories you could include on your weekly to-do list could be:
- At computer
- In the car
- On phone
- At Home
- At Work
- Outside
Then, you could list out tasks in the corresponding category. (You could even list tasks with a time amount to make it easier to pick the right task for that moment.)
Category #4: Someday
We can’t work on every goal that we’ve ever had all at once. We have to pick and choose the things that we want to focus on. In the case of some of our big dreams and projects, we may have to decide that those things are not our focus right now. These tasks should be put on our someday list. I’d love to take a trip back to Austria and visit Vienna with my husband, but that is just not a priority right now. It’s on my someday list, but it is not something I’m actively working toward right now.
Just because you place something on the someday list does not mean that it will always take on that list. These lists are fluid and should be constantly changing as things come up in life. Earlier this year, we were looking at getting some livestock for our property, but we decided that was not the right next action for our family. That task moved off of our “Next Actions” list and onto the “Someday” list until we felt like we were ready to act on it.
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The Project Notebook
After you create your lists, you need to create a place to house all of your lists, goals, dreams, and routines. I call this a Project Notebook. This is not a planner. Instead, this is the perfect complement to the planner that you didn’t know you needed. I always found that I was writing about 20 to-do lists in addition to trying to keep an updated planner. It just wasn’t working. What I needed was a centralized place where I kept all of my to-do lists, while saving my planner for dates, appointments, and things that I had to get done on a certain day. In organizational terms, I needed a ‘home’ for my to-do lists.
Your Project Notebook is the home for your to-do lists. It’s where you can store all of your goal-setting and vision-casting pages, current to-do lists, and project workflow brainstorming.
It contains the following sections:
Section #1: Goals and Vision
I like to keep my goal-setting pages close by when planning to refer back to them, so I like to keep them in my project notebook. By placing it on the front few pages, I’m constantly reminded of the big vision I have for my year and my life. It also helps remind me when it’s time to do my seasonal review. This is the place to store all your yearly reviews, habit brainstorming, and goal-setting pages.
Section #2: My Actions Lists
I put my four lists in the next section of my project notebook. This includes my “Do Now, Waiting For, Next Actions, and Someday” lists. I don’t think that you should refer back to these lists every day. Instead, these lists should be part of your weekly review process. You can mark off what needs to be done, move tasks around, and determine some next actions for projects. Your weekly review should also be the time when you get to “Inbox zero” both for your physical inbox and your email inbox. Again, when you are going through your inbox, you are adding these tasks to the corresponding lists. Then, you would do your “Do Now” Actions during your weekly review or soon after. Your Next Actions list can be added to your planner in an appropriate spot.
Section #3: Project Lists
Now, for some projects, you need to make a plan for how to complete it. I think weekly tasks should be pulled from your Do Now and Next Actions lists. But, sometimes it’s hard to keep track of all the future tasks that you need to do for a specific project. This is where project lists come in.
Basically, for each project – whether it’s one-time or seasonal – that you have, you write down a list of what needs to get done. So, if your project is to paint the bathroom, your list might look like this:
- Pick bathroom shade
- Buy paint supplies
- Move furniture out and tape the bathroom
- Paint first coat
- Paint second coat
- Move furniture in
By planning out specific tasks, you know exactly what the order of your project will be. As you work through your next actions list, you can refer back to this project list to determine your next action for this particular project and move it to the list. Obviously, you will have to use flexibility and discernment as you work through it. Maybe you realize you need to patch all the holes in the wall after you move the furniture out which means you have to go back to the store to get patching supplies. Or maybe you decide to replace the toilet while you are working which leads to a whole nother level of project. Just update your “Paint the Bathroom” project list and write down your next action on the to-do’s for that week.
I wouldn’t write daily routines in this section, but you could do seasonal projects here, like put in the garden or close the pool, to refer back to over the years.
Once you finish a project, you can decide if you would like to keep the list and move it to a done section of your notebook or just throw the paper away. That’s totally up to you and your personality.
Section #4: Other Checklists
Last but definitely not least is our section for routines, habits, schedules, and checklists. You can think of this section of the project notebook as a reference section. Again, you probably won’t look at your project notebook every day, but even going through the process of developing routines and schedules will help you get closer to implementing those in your life.
This section can be the spot to write down your morning and evening routine, weekly events and commitments, other weekly responsibilities, cleaning schedules, etc. You can also develop other checklists like “Getting ready for company”, “Packing Lists”, “Camping Checklist”, and others. This is just a place to house all of those ideas to refer back to as time goes on.
All About the Weekly Review
In our theme of the year podcast episode, we talked about how the effectiveness of your theme of the year – or any resolution or goal – is directly related to the ‘sticking power’ of that thing. The sticking power is how well you remember that goal months down the line when people have moved on and January is a distant memory. If you don’t remember something, you will not make progress on it.
In the same vein, your Project Notebook can be an incredibly valuable planning tool as long as you use it. You need to set up routines to make sure that you are continually coming back to your action lists, your project notebook, and your planner so that the system has ‘sticking power.’ The best way to do this is to set up an effective weekly review process.
The best time to do this is at the end of the week so that everything from the previous week is fresh in your mind. Take 15 minutes to conquer the following:
During your weekly review, you should do the following:
- Create (or Print Off) a new “Do-Now” and “Next Actions” List.
- Review old “Do-Now” and “Next Actions” Lists and transfer to this week.
- Empty your physical and digital inbox and throw away unnecessary items, while writing down new tasks on the appropriate task list.
- Review “Waiting For” and “Someday” Lists and Project Lists, updating as needed.
- Complete any “Do-Nows” for this week
- Update planner with calendar items and “Next Actions”
This won’t take that much time, but by utilizing these few minutes at the end of the work week, you can feel more confident and assured that the tasks and responsibilities you have are being taken care of. You will feel less like you are stuck in a web and more like you are walking on a path in the direction of your dreams. The Project Notebook will be a crucial first step towards getting there.
In addition to weekly reviews, I would incorporate a daily planner check time into your schedule each day. This is a simple habit that is meant to just get our eyes on our planner so that we remember what we need to get done that day. You could look at your planner once a day, probably in the morning as part of your morning routine. Or, you could look at it twice, once with your morning routine and once as part of your evening routine.
If this process interests you, be sure to check out the podcast where we are currently talking about getting things done from a biblical perspective. You can also check out our store where we have printable versions of the Project Notebook, Action Lists, and other planner downloads.
Until next time, keep creating a life you love, and cultivating your heart for God.
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