Had a facepalm moment the other day. Realized that to-do items were split between two reference classes, unambiguous tasks and ambiguous tasks. Unambiguous tasks have some combination of known next action, known time envelope, known what ‘finished’ looks like concretely, while ambiguous tasks have below threshold levels of some or all of these. Realized life can be as simple as notating ambiguous items with a capital A, at which point its default next action is to disambiguate the above.
Your description of ambiguous tasks reminds me of wicked problems. I’m familiar with their appearance in the software development process. There, the consensus has settled on some form of iterative development.
This is a big bugbear of mine, as it seems most of the literature I’ve come across implicitly assumes to-do items are what you call unambiguous type (and therefore you’re lazy or perhaps “lack motivation” as the sole impediment). And I find very little advice on how to disambiguate them (this is probably the nature of the beast—in that depending what knowledge or skills a certain project or tasks requires, how to disambiguate requires leveraging such knowledge and skills).
Had a facepalm moment the other day. Realized that to-do items were split between two reference classes, unambiguous tasks and ambiguous tasks. Unambiguous tasks have some combination of known next action, known time envelope, known what ‘finished’ looks like concretely, while ambiguous tasks have below threshold levels of some or all of these. Realized life can be as simple as notating ambiguous items with a capital A, at which point its default next action is to disambiguate the above.
Pretty similar to the “write down next actions, not end state” from Getting Things Done.
Your description of ambiguous tasks reminds me of wicked problems. I’m familiar with their appearance in the software development process. There, the consensus has settled on some form of iterative development.
This is a big bugbear of mine, as it seems most of the literature I’ve come across implicitly assumes to-do items are what you call unambiguous type (and therefore you’re lazy or perhaps “lack motivation” as the sole impediment). And I find very little advice on how to disambiguate them (this is probably the nature of the beast—in that depending what knowledge or skills a certain project or tasks requires, how to disambiguate requires leveraging such knowledge and skills).