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Back to EpisodesWhat Does Doing Look Like?
Description
This week, we’re looking at David Allen’s quote: “what does doing look like?”
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Episode 241 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 241 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
In his book; Getting Things Done, David Allen uses the term: “What does doing look like?”. Now for those of you who have read the book, this quote probably washed over you in the excitement of learning about contexts, next action, ticklers and someday maybes.
However, these five words connect perfectly to a common issue many people face. We know we need to do something, and we have a reasonable idea of what the finished something is, but we are not clear on what we need to do in order to accomplish it.
This results in tasks that are unclear or seemingly too large to do, and we end up stalling and postponing the task.
So, this week, we’re going to look at this and see where we can get some clarity. And that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Joseph. Joseph asks, Hi Carl, I find I am avoiding doing a lot of my tasks because I am not sure what exactly I need to do. I might have a task to contact someone about something, but when I sit down to do it, my mind is blank, and I procrastinate and then don’t do it. How do you make your tasks doable?
Hi Joseph, thank you for your question.
That’s a good question, and it reminded me of David Allen's quote about knowing what doing looks like.
Essentially this means when you write a task, you need to be very clear about what action needs to be taken in order to complete the task.
I see this problem a lot when people are working on listing out their core work. One of a manager’s core tasks would be to manage a team of people. But what does managing a team of people actually mean at the task level?
You will see this also with a project manager’s role. “