“Let me see your list?” I asked.

“Okay, but I haven’t really looked at it for a couple of days,” Marie mildly protested. We had been talking about time management. “I mean, I added a couple of things to it this week, but” Her voice trailed off as if she had another reason, but it just wasn’t worth the effort.

“Looking at your list, I see a couple of things. You have some easy single tasks that look like you could just knock off in a few minutes, but you also have some things that look like projects, like this budget you need to do for the Phoenix Redesign.”

Marie looked over my shoulder. “Oh, yeah, in fact, items 3, 6 and 7 are already done, I just didn’t scratch them off. And the Phoenix Redesign, I just can’t seem to get around to it.”

“When is the Phoenix budget due?”

“Well, three days ago, but nobody has asked me for it, so I probably have a couple of more days.” Marie winced as she was telling me.

“Why such a hard time getting started on it?”

“It’s a pretty complicated project. There are probably six or seven steps to it and I need some other people to help me on parts of it.”

“How long has it been on your to-do list?” I asked.

Marie winced again. “At least a couple of months.”

“Okay, I want to change the way we handle your to-do list. We are going to create a project list, called the Phoenix Redesign Project List.

“Your difficulty is not seeing the details of the project, specifically, you don’t know what the next step is. There are six or seven, but you haven’t listed them out and you don’t know what the next one is. That’s why the whole project has moved on your list, undisturbed from week to week for the past two months.

“Here is your assignment. Take the Phoenix Project, list out the six or seven steps and mark the Robust Next Step. Tomorrow, we will see how this works back into your overall to-do list.” -TF