[bufordsharkley]

Agreed. The pomodoro technique asks that no task is more than 7 pomodoros (sets of 25 minutes of focused work).

With this constraint, what once looked like an overwhelming and nebulous task now seems manageable and concrete.

[MaulingMonkey]

A pattern I'm recently noticing for myself is that even if a task doesn't feel "overwhelming" or "nebulous" per se, it seems to be easier to motivate myself to knock out a small task than a large one.

Rinse a dish. Open a letter. Rename a variable. Root cause a bug. Rough out the skeleton for a feature. Write a unit test. Download an installer. Make a commit. Email someone.

I'm noting there's a difference between small tasks and a small task. Big TODO lists may not be nebulous - I find them quite handy for ensuring a complete and thorough job is done, and for project progress tracking - but they're still big, potentially overwhelming huge things. And if not overwhelming, something that I'm not going to finish today anyways - it won't hurt to wait until tomorrow...

Instead of more TODO lists, I should invest in having a TODO item.