EVERYTHING ON YOUR BADASS TO DO LIST MUST BE ACTIONABLE!
Your BATDL is not a vision board.
Your BATDL is not your five year plan.
Your BATDL is not a compendium of all your hopes and dreams.
Your BATDL is not a place to use magical or wishful thinking.
Your BATDL is about the task you NEED to complete to make your live move forward. As such, every task on this list has to be actionable… now. Obviously, that doesn’t mean that you have to complete every task now. That would be nuts. You can only do one thing at a time. But all the items on your BATDL very much have to be discreetly actionable items.
A few quick but very different examples. Laundry. I would argue that you can’t put “laundry” on your BATDL. It is not really a task, in and of itself. Laundry is made up of these tasks in my household: Sort laundry, strip beds, start laundry, make my youngest’s bed, make our bed, fold laundry, and put laundry away. Yes, the breaking down of this larger item in to actionable tasks may be filed under No. 7, breaking things down into pieces. But the way you might know that it needs to be broken down is because the item itself is so broad as to not really have a meaning and is not actually doable.
There are also times in life when we forget what I call, “the prerequisite tasks.” Our tendency is to just put that last task in a chain on the list. Generally speaking, when our brains see that task on our list and know there are several other, not accounted for task we need to do first, we tend to freeze and avoid. But if you can notice this as it happens, you can change your behavior and determine the string of actionable tasks leading to that last task. This will free you up to to all of them. Not that this would be likely, but imagine if you hadn’t started laundry but the only item on your list was, “Put Laundry Away.” That would be nuts. That is an action you could, thoeretically, accomplish. But it is is not actionable now.
Follow ups are also important, especially in the corporate world. When you need to do something in the future, don’t put it on your BADTL now. Use your calendar to remind you when it is appropriate to follow up and put the task on your BATDL at the appropriate time. That way you can know that your digital calendar will remind you when that task becomes actionable. And, that is when you capture it, without having to either have it clogging your BATDL when you can’t do it anyway, or dominating your consciousness while you try not to forget to do it at a future date.
Standard disclaimer: When posting my thoughts here, I feel that content is far more important than perfection. I try to practice what I preach that ‘done’ is better than ‘not done…perfectly.’ So, unlike with my book, I don’t edit much, if at all. I hope you can look past any small imperfections and find the content useful.