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How Do We Actually Feel in Our Everyday Lives?
It's a deceptively simple question, but it took acclaimed psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi years, and a whole new approach to sampling behavior, to answer it.
He developed the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), where participants would be given a beeper that went off randomly during the day. At the sound of the beep, they were required to stop and record what they were doing and how they felt about it.
While it also sounds like a deceptively easy solution, this 1980 study created one of the most comprehensive looks into the human emotions of daily life, and it made one thing clear:
The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.
He found that we are happiest in a state of flow, being challenged just enough to maintain a sharp point of focus. So if flow is what fulfills us, why do we waste our time on meaningless things?
Put simply, It's much easier to organize your dresser than get your Europe trip out of the group chat. Sometimes, the goals we have are too big to face. Instead of the flow we want to achieve, the mere act of *starting* can create a resistance too strong for us to even consider focusing. So, for many of us, we turn to the easier task of least resistance.
But wouldn’t it be nice if someone could give you a list of tasks, each varying from dead simple to perfectly difficult, that could be completed at any time? And you could pick and choose depending on your mood and energy? What if, also, by completing these tasks, you could slowly and consistently complete the goals you've set in life?
We could throw money at the problem. A life coach costs upwards of $150 an hour, and a secretary roughly $2,000 a month, not to mention the training that comes with them. But that solution is definitely not viable for a lot of us.
The Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology has a focus on how to get your past self to be your future self's secretary, no personalization required since you know yourself best. It gives the "You" now a chance for small and big wins whenever you have a moment free.
🗒️ So How Do We Do This?
In Part One we learned about noting everything, creating inboxes, the three types of tasks, and forming that central inbox. You now have all these different ideas, tasks, and thoughts. What's next?
Now, you need to process the central inbox. This part’s simple—there are two rules:
1) Process your inbox in order
2) Never skip anything while processing
The moment you start processing your inbox, it is important that you work from one end to the other. If you start to skip items in your inbox, they’ll pile up and you’ll grow apprehensive towards it. (Think about those thousands of emails you have!)
Now that that's settled…
What is Processing?
First and foremost, processing is defining exactly what needs to be done, followed by categorizing it into what type of task it is.
For example, let’s say your central inbox reads:
"Reach out to my professor about emails.”
I would first define it by rewriting it as:
“Draft email to professor requesting email distribution to Department”
...and then sort it into my Next Actions list.
But this is a lot, let's break it down:
✏️ Defining the Action:
Anything that isn't a task should be easy to identify.
Looking at the last post, "When you lend a pen, never expect to get it back" is obviously a random unrelated thought and not a task. So it would be discarded from the inbox. (This would go in my Zettelkasten!)
No matter what type of task it is, you must define the Next Visible and Actionable Step. The wording here is important; the clearer the task is, the easier it will be to complete.
Instead of: “Encourage more students to go to events,”
try: “Collect signatures from students in my class as RSVPs for these events.”
It should be broken down with enough context that, even if you forget all the details, you can still complete the task.
🗣️ "But Vince!" I hear you ask, "What if I can't define my next action because I can't make a decision?"
Good point. If there is anything you take away from reading this, please make it the idea that:
“Making a Decision is not an Action.”
To believe otherwise is a method of procrastination in disguise.
Making a Decision is Not an Action
Picture it: You add "Decide on where to travel" to your Next Actions list. Now every time you go over all the tasks you have to do, you'll be unnerved over the fact that you have to settle and make that choice.
What if you choose the wrong place?
What if you pick someplace completely out of budget?
What if you want to travel with several people?
Plain and simple, that task is never getting done.
The solution? 99% of "deciding" tasks are really a need for information in disguise.
In cases like these, you should either
1) Settle and make the choice when it comes up (Rule 1 of Processing!)
2) Determine exactly what information you need to make that decision, and make finding the answer your next action.
If you are still having problems, it might really be an issue of having an ill-defined goal, which we will touch on at the end.
In this case, "Decide on where to travel" turns into:
"Set a budget for my trip," or
"Determine if Korea is within my travel budget."
Now, when you look over your task list, it feels much easier to accomplish. Instead of a “Figure it all out” issue, it becomes a “Research this one question” task.
Sorting the Action
Now that you have clearly defined the next visible and actionable step of a task, you need to figure out what to do with them. Recall from the previous post that there are three types of tasks:
📅 Calendar/Reminder Tasks
These are the only items that should go on your calendar: tasks and meetings that require a time or date and have a real deadline with consequences.
If you have items in your inboxes related to these meetings, you can append them to the calendar reminders for even better organization.
⏳ Waiting For Tasks
When you realize that you can only wait, it's important to have someplace to remember what you're waiting for, and how long it's been.
If you find it has been a while, you might even create a new task to send a reminder out or find what the holdup is.
✅ Next Actions
These will be the Visible and Actionable tasks you can complete whenever you have free time. The order you complete them is personal, whether it be by priority or your own personal energy level at the time.
As you go through processing your inbox, you are bound to encounter tasks that wildly vary in difficulty, some long—like “Complete annotation for chapter 4”—and others very short, like “Venmo $50 to your buddy.”
Now here's the kicker:
⏲️ The Real Two Minute Rule
One of the biggest things GTD advertises is being the origin of the “Two Minute Rule.” So, so many productivity gurus get this fundamentally wrong and it makes me irrationally angry. The common misconception is that if you don't want to start a task, set a timer for two minutes, and start the task. You can stop when the timer stops.
While this is certainly a productivity trick, it's not a very good one. If you can’t find the motivation to start, gaslighting yourself into thinking you'll only work for a little bit isn't going to help either.
The real Two Minute Rule, simply put, states that while processing your inbox, if you think a task will take under two minutes, then do it in the moment you realize.
So for example, let’s say as you go through your inbox you see, "Sign off on confirmation via email." It would be a huge waste of time to process it, and you know it would take less than two minutes, so just do it now and cross it off the list.
The key difference between this and the misconception is that you're already in the productive state of sorting your inbox, so that motivation will carry over to that task at hand.
Now, after all that, let's take a lived example!
How Do We Actually Do This?
Let's take the sample from the last article:
1. Reach out to my professor about emails
This one is easy, rewrite it into "Draft email to professor about event advertisement to the faculty," and save it for when I have free time. If I already have the email drafted, I'll send it the moment I realize the task is almost done since that'll take less than two minutes.
2. Figure out how to get a confirmation for my CLEP to hit registrars
Surprise! It’s a task to make a decision, as it stands this really isn't a task or a next action. So, what’s the inquiry in disguise?
Well, to get the answer to this question I'd need to contact someone, so my next action could either be "Contact registrars about confirmation that my CLEP will hit my transcript" or, if I don't think registrars is the person to contact, "Schedule an appointment with my advisor to see who to contact about the CLEP."
3. When you lend a pen, never expect to get it back
This isn't a task, it's more a fleeting thought. So either discard it or throw it in your [Zettlekasten!]
4. Book tickets for May Trip
Looking at it now, this task would have taken two minutes, why didn't I do this before?
Ahh... I'm actually Waiting For my friends to send me the money for their tickets, so I'll keep note of that in the Waiting For list and set a next action as a reminder to contact them about it.
The processing of an inbox takes some time to get used to, especially when you're trying to uncover "hidden" tasks. But as you get more practice, it becomes a powerful tool.
The moment you finally are able to take everything out of your head and have clear and detailed reminders of everything you’re doing, either on a specific day or whenever you are free, is a powerful stress reliever. It's those times when you want to relax where you can really trust you actually have nothing to do.
But how can you be so sure?
We'll get to that in part three, but here's a sneak peek!
What’s Next?
You have all these tasks, but they feel chaotic. Some are huge ideas, others are routine. Some are waiting on future steps.
How do you keep them together?
Bring in: Projects
Getting Things Done states you can’t complete projects.
A project is just a list of tasks that leads to your desired outcome.
You don’t do a project—you complete steps toward it.
In Part 3, I’ll break down:
What constitutes a project
How to keep track so you’re always making progress
And why defining a project clearly solves half the work