If you know what you intend to do when commencing a work session for a task, the process of completing the task becomes much less arduous. To add, if you can identify a finite set of actions that you tend to perform for almost every task you complete, you now have something akin to a general productivity framework.

Intention in the context of task management has three modes:

The Survey mode is where you scout out the environment likely to contain the resources you think you'll need to resolve the task at hand.

The Progress mode (the verb, meaning it's read with emphasis on the second syllable) is where you feel like you're smoothly progressing towards your "destination," meaning the resolution of your task.

The Resolve mode is for when you believe that you will be able to resolve a task the next time you address it. A task can be resolved in one of four ways:

With this intention designation system, you can easily assign each task on your to-do list an intention mode, so that you know how to approach each task on your to-do list. This system is an implementation of the Expand and Contract concept introduced in an earlier post. 

Assigning intentions to tasks has proven to be an effective way for me to classify tasks, since it helps me overcome the biggest hindrance to my productivity: uncertainty.

If you'd like to see this system in action, check out my task manager, Sort Stack.

Original Date: October 10, 2022