D2 – Identify your new tasks

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The review stage ends on 2025-11-01.

What

While working on your daily tasks, you will come up with ideas for new tasks, and your environment may refer new tasks to you as well. All of them are identified and captured in this activity.

Why

When you realize that there’s something you have to or want to do, you should take note of it immediately; otherwise,

• you may forget it, and
• it would take mental energy to keep it in your mind (which is a waste), and
• your mind may remember it when you’re in the middle of something else, which would be distracting.

How

Your environment refers work to you all the time. However, don’t be reactive: Don’t limit yourself to adding work that’s referred to you, but also actively look for new tasks you can add to your system. Don’t forget that this is an integrated system for your work, hobbies, and every other aspect of your life.

Create new tasks as soon as they are identified. Sometimes, you may do the task immediately, even before adding it to your system. In that case, it’s better to have the self-discipline to add the task to the system afterwards, because it provides you with a good history of what you’ve done. Only tasks that are both short and unimportant are not worth submitting into the system. If it was an important task that took you only a few seconds to do, you should still add it to your system.

If you have interesting ideas about the task, write them inside the task as soon as you identify it so that you won’t forget the ideas.

Sometimes, you may have something in mind, but you’re not sure whether it’s a good idea to do it. Don’t wait for the decision – create its task immediately to free up your mind and have a history of your ideas. You can always cancel the task later.

When possible, merge similar tasks into a recurring task to keep the list simpler, give it more structure, and discover opportunities. For example, if you have a task for reading Animal Farm and now you’re adding a new task of reading Fahrenheit 451, you can recognize a pattern. You can merge these two into a task called something like “learn how politics works”. Then you can ask yourself what other books you can add to this task, and a good answer would be The Prince.

The projects you work with may have structured management systems that assign tasks to you. In that case, you’re not supposed to duplicate those tasks in your personal task management system. You have the following options, depending on the project management system:

• In a healthy setup, the project management system won’t go through the lowest level of detail but rather leaves that to you. It means that each task you have in the project management system will be converted into many smaller, manageable tasks in your personal task management system.
• In an unhealthy setup, where your tasks are fully detailed in the project management system, you should create very high-level tasks in your personal task management system to reflect groups of those small tasks and avoid duplicating the details. Moreover, you can create a task for finding a better job!

Common pitfalls

If you identify a new task while working on one of your daily tasks, don’t switch to the new one right away, if possible, but create the new task and immediately get back to what you were doing before.

If you’re using a computer to manage your tasks and yet find it distracting to add each new task on the computer, you can instead write new tasks on a piece of paper and enter them into your computer at the end of the day. To do that, you should have the discipline of having pen and paper handy at all times.

Write the name of the task clearly so that you can understand it when you see it ten years later. A task with a name like “send the proposal” is not okay, because you will probably work on more than one proposal in your life. Something named “proposal - abc - 10k - 50 ppl” is not okay either unless you have many such tasks and a well-defined way of abbreviating them. Even then, the few seconds you save when typing may not be worth the mental energy you have to spend decoding the cryptic text every time you see it.