My husband and I bought a house a few months ago, and we have built up quite a long list of things we’d like to do to fix it up. Periodically we pull out the list and look at it, talk about it, look around the house, poke around a little, and then put the list away. Nothing really gets finished.
One night we pulled out the list and looked at it again and realized that we weren’t making any progress. We decided to change that. First we numbered the items 1 (do very soon), 2 (do in a few months), 3 (do later on), and 4 (someday–although I questioned whether this was a euphemism for “never”). Then we put the 1’s on another list and began breaking them down into Next Steps. My husband commented that it feels like you could break it down infinitely (as in, “Step one: stand up. Step two: walk to closet. Step three: get out screwdrivers. Step four: scratch itch on arm.” And so on…) and only get halfway there each time. He went along with it though when I explained that the reason we never got anything done is that we didn’t know where to start or what to do next after we started. If you have a list of next steps, you just do the next thing on the list and eventually you’re done.
After we had our list of next steps, tasks felt like they were finally within reach. We knew exactly what we needed to do in order to accomplish those things that had been hanging around on the list for months. My husband got excited and started fixing things right away. I wanted to get some schoolwork done early the next morning, so I went to bed and left him downstairs happily crossing things off the to-do list.
