Tasks

What is a task?

A task is a specific action you will take to advance your purpose. The resolution of a task generally begins at a higher level (for example, “clean my room”) and subdivides into finer details as you plan and work (for example, “make my bed”).

Tasks are how you implement your life plan through what you do each day. Your daily tasks advance your purpose by demonstrating who you are (qualities) in accordance with your priorities (values) to accomplish your goals, according to your beliefs.

While your life plan describes how you would like to be, you won’t complete the decision of becoming that person until and unless you actually do what is described. The tasks you accomplish will uniquely determine how fully you live up to your purpose, qualities, values, and beliefs.

Everything you ever accomplish will happen through what you choose to do each day. No matter how grand the vision you have for your life, it will happen or not based only on what you do each and every day. The life plan gives you a way of discovering what tasks you can do every day that best produce progress in what matters most to you.

The whole purpose of a life plan is to choose, prioritize, and motivate the specific tasks you do each day. Daily tasks are the unique window through which you implement everything you have described in your life plan.

Your life plan is the bridge between your transcendent purpose and your daily activities. Your plan is an engineered flow from the greatest meaning in your life down to each moment in your life.

Your life plan spans the largest macro view down to the most minor daily detail. The act of making a plan brings your excitement for major accomplishments down into the daily tasks required to achieve them.

As such, while the life plan is designed and modified in the macro view, its power is transferred into your life in the micro view. The tool through which every part of your life plan transfers to your actual execution is your to do list.

The plan provides the reason to believe that your daily tasks will best orient you toward the greatest joy. It is what allows you to convincingly claim that the way you will achieve your purpose each day is by fully focusing everything on the task list for that day. In this way, you harness all the power of your purpose—no matter how grandiose, into your daily tasks—no matter how mundane they may be.

Why goals aren’t enough

A tremendous benefit of obtaining and retaining a task-based focus is that you experience a greater quantity and frequency of satisfaction and progress than you would by focusing on a goal alone. Tasks provide evidence of incremental progress on your goals, which imparts happiness and momentum.

As you execute the tasks you’ve decomposed from each goal, you bring the satisfaction of accomplishing that goal down to the accomplishment of each task, and the satisfaction of progress on that goal down to progress on each task. Beyond making the journey much more enjoyable, you will find yourself much more motivated to make progress—no matter how mundane the task at hand, while locking in joy whether the goal is actually achieved or not.

Many goals depend on the choices of others. A task-based focus will grant you the greatest possible independence from the actions or inactions of others, as well as unanticipated changes. If you truly believe you’ve identified the list of tasks that describe all you can do to achieve the goal, you can claim a great deal of the satisfaction you would have if you achieved it independent of the factors you cannot control.

When you enumerate tasks, the success of the goal ceases to be a question of whether you achieve it directly—which may become impossible due to the choices of others—but whether you did all you needed to do to contribute your part to its success. You will be surprised to find how much of the satisfaction of completing a goal can be enjoyed when you do your part, even if the goal itself isn’t achieved.

You don’t find peace about your to do list through finishing it, but by being fully engaged in the highest priority items from it. When you are consuming your resources on the highest priorities, everything else ceases to matter until or unless priorities change or new resources emerge.

Tasks differentiate goals from wishes

Goals can and should be used to generate the specific tasks that will accomplish them. Goals without accompanying tasks to accomplish them will provide drastically reduced benefits compared to a complete plan.

Goals are not wishes. The presence or absence of a plausible plan to accomplish your goals will determine how wholeheartedly you pursue each task required to achieve them.

Planning reduces anxiety by providing evidence that you have a plausible solution to the problems you face. Overthinking about a problem is one source of anxiety. Making a plan for what you will do while fully processing all important factors alleviates this kind of anxiety. Once something is planned, there is no need to revisit it unless you have new information.

Vacuous hope is a senseless fantasy. True hope requires a plausible plan consisting of concrete steps and sufficient reasons to believe they will work.

Many people refuse to take any action whatsoever to approach what they claim to want because they know they are unwilling to do what is required to get it, preferring vacuous hope in the impossible to uncertainty in what is attemptable. Vacuous wishes can never provide the confidence of plausible hope.

Enumerate your tasks

Once goals are set, they are used to define specific tasks. Goals serve as the source and outcome of the tasks you will accomplish. Tasks are your best guess as to how to achieve your goals. They are well-defined actions that you could put on a daily to do list.

Great accomplishments always require exceptional effort over time. You must learn how to write the story that convincingly leads from where you are to where you want to go. Rare indeed is the person who not only has a goal for the future, but a plausible plan for how to get there. It is much easier to have a goal for the future than it is to develop and commit to a plausible plan to get there.¹

Every goal, no matter how audacious, can be decomposed into tasks that describe what to do in a given moment. Just as your goals decompose your purpose into quantifiable achievements, your tasks decompose your goals into manageably specific actions. Audacious goals will typically require more than one task to accomplish. Some goals will require many tasks to accomplish.

In order to accomplish audacious goals, you must learn how to deconstruct them into discrete actions in specific times and places. The process is incomplete until it yields the specific list of what you’ll be doing today. To the degree that you can’t readily recite what you are doing today and don’t sincerely believe it to be what will give you the greatest long-term joy, you will miss out on the endurance, power, focus, and satisfaction you would otherwise have.

Many people set goals without specifically enumerating tasks. Goals without tasks lack the power of goals with tasks. Decomposing a goal into tasks is like decomposing a war into a series of battles. Wars are fought one battle at a time. Imagine a general passing detailed orders down to a colonel, only for the colonel to leave his captains to figure out the rest for themselves. Deconstructing goals into tasks brings down all the benefits of goals into the decisions of each moment rather than leaving them for themselves. How ridiculous would it be to run miles of electric cable only to stop at your property boundary and hope your circuits will somehow connect on their own?

Your set of tasks for each goal should persuasively describe what would achieve the goal as set. Backwards planning is a powerful tool to assist you in enumerating the necessary tasks to accomplish each of your goals. Backwards planning starts with the desired outcome, then tracks through each precondition required to achieve it. For example, if you want a boiled egg, you need to boil an egg for 15 minutes, which requires you to get a pot and water and an egg, and also requires a source of heat. If you lack one or more of these, you’ll have to build a process to obtain them before you can even begin making a boiled egg.

If it’s difficult to believe that the tasks you have enumerated would convincingly accomplish the goal, you need to add or reformulate tasks until it does. You are finished enumerating tasks for your goals when you have a set of tasks that you are fully convinced will accomplish the goal you have set.

Often, you won’t know enough to create a list that you are confident will complete the goal. Sometimes this is because you need information that the completion of initial tasks will provide in order to list subsequent tasks. In this case, break apart your goal to separate the initial subtasks from what comes later. Sometimes, you won’t have enough information to know the steps to complete a goal, in which case your next task will consist of what you can do to find out more. As you live what you know, you’ll learn more of what you don’t know, and you’ll be able to return to your life plan and add missing details. Remember, this is a malleable document. Part of its power is the feedback loop where you will make changes as you live your plan and learn more about what you want and how to get it.

Prioritizing tasks

If you have more than one goal, it is only possible to create a prioritized list of how these goals interact through enumerating and ranking the tasks required to achieve them.

The priority of the goal to which a task pertains establishes the default priority of the task. Additional factors will fine tune the priority, such as prerequisites, convenience, unexpected opportunities, and boosting tasks that pertain to more than one goal.

One help in prioritizing the tasks of a goal is to frame it as a problem by asking: “What is the greatest barrier to accomplishing this goal?” It is usually easier to see what impedes progress than what accelerates it. Whatever detracts most from your goal might be a good candidate for what to address first.

Joy comes through progress in the highest priority tasks

Happiness is not a mystery, even if we treat it as one. It’s long been known that happiness comes through perceived progress on a worthwhile goal, but very few people act in concert with this understanding.

The secret to unlocking greater happiness is to realize you can’t choose happiness directly—you choose it by choosing what causes it. You can tell yourself to be happy all you want, but that’s like telling yourself not to be hungry when you haven't eaten.

In order to be happy, you need to want something and you need to live according to a plausible plan for obtaining it.

Feed your joy through making a life plan and living out the tasks you determine will lead you toward accomplishing your audacious goals. When you are completing tasks that consist of what is rationally required to achieve a goal, you will experience a flow of confidence in eventual completion of the goal and a preview of the contentment you will feel when you accomplish the goal.

Transcendent purpose makes daily work meaningful

How much do you enjoy the tasks you face each day? If you find a significant difference in how you feel about the things you want to do and things you have to do, ask yourself the following:

• Are you honest about what you want and why you want it? Have you set your goals based on the qualities you have listed in your life plan?
• Are you doing the most important things? Do you organize each day, and each period of each day, according to the priorities you have set in the values section of your life plan?
• Are you doing the right things? Do the goals you have set circumscribe the things you have to do each day? If not, how can you change your goals to include everything you need to do? How can you change your tasks to remove what does not contribute to your goals?

As long as your daily actions are misaligned with the rest of your life plan, you won’t experience the full benefits of your transcendent purpose in your daily life. The daily barriers to excellence will always outweigh the daily motivators for overcoming them when the daily tasks are taken independent of your purpose.

When you realize you are lacking motivation in any moment on any day, you can and should be able to ask: “Why am I doing this?” If you have earnestly followed the life plan framework, your sincere answer will always be: “Because this will lead me to the greatest joy.”

Because a life plan provides a mapping between daily tasks and your transcendent purpose, you will find yourself with overwhelmingly sufficient reasons to not only accomplish much more each day, but with joy and satisfaction in what would previously be a chore. You will do more and better than you thought you could and sacrifice what you thought you wanted because of what you want even more. You will also discover that you have previously unrecognized opportunities daily to engage with particularly difficult tasks that were simply beyond your ability to cope with under the prior paradigm.

The hierarchical nature of the life plan orders and incentivizes the unglamorous activities that are completely necessary to achieve what you say you want the most. Without it, you have no idea just how many of the things you feel are important and enjoyable detract from—and even prevent—what you really want the most. With it, you will routinely set aside what your former self would have avidly pursued in order to do what your former self would have found too boring, tedious, or unimportant because you will recognize what the former prevents and the latter enables.

When you realize the connection between your daily toil— whatever it may be—and your purpose, you will find power and motivation in what would otherwise be perceived as distractions from what you really want. You have to see the things you need to do as essential to what you want to do. The life plan will help you connect these, and with the connection comes a flow of power and purpose.