If you were to hire me as your productivity coach, we’d spend our first few sessions formulating your Project List. That list is the lynchpin of your productive life, and we can’t do much else without it.
Let me save you that expense by walking you through it now.13
Your Project List is a list of the outcomes you are currently committed to achieving, all in one place. It is an inventory of all the things you’re trying to produce, create, accomplish, or resolve.
It’s like a to-do list, but on a bigger scale and longer time horizon so you can tell where you’re headed. It’s like a list of goals, but more practical and rooted in the here and now.
Formulating your Project List is an incredibly useful exercise in its own right, as well as the cornerstone of PARA. Most people find that following the steps below takes five to ten minutes and produces a list of around ten to twenty projects. This is why we want to use a software program to keep track of them—not our brains!