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.