Problems Are Projects

Series Intro

Time management is usually taught as calendar tricks, productivity apps (YAYY SAAS), and morally superior morning routines.

Wrong frame.

Before you can manage your time, you need to know what has your attention. This six-part series is about getting the open loops out of your head, turning them into next actions, and building enough control to do the work that matters.

Last issue here: Your System is Going to Rot

Early in my career, I asked a mentor a question I thought was profound and probably wasn’t: are we winning the counter-terrorism fight, or just spinning our wheels?

I was probably twenty-six, full of opinions, and trying to connect the daily grind of working for the government to the grand sweep of political history.

He looked at me like I had just asked whether pest control was spiritually fulfilling.

Then he said, “Counter-terrorism is just extermination.”

“You never win.”

“You’re just squashing bugs.”

“Nothing fancy about it.”

Brutal & correct.

Most of us do a much lower-stakes version of this every day.

You wake up, open your laptop, squash whatever bug is crawling across your desk, and call that a productive day. A lot of knowledge work is the same way.

Email answered, Slack cleared, customer saved, tiny fire out.

Then two months later you look around and realize the house is still rotting.

You have been termite spraying your life instead of deciding what actually needs to be rebuilt.

That is why projects matter: they turn recurring pain into a defined end state, and then force you to pick the next physical action instead of spending another week swatting at symptoms.

One step vs. many steps

"Call the dentist" is a next action. One physical step. You pick up the phone, you do it, you cross it off.

"Buy a car" is NOT a next action. Neither is "fix onboarding" or "get promoted" or "lose 20 pounds." Those are projects: anything that takes more than one step. And if your projects are sitting on your to-do list disguised as tasks, you will stare at them for six months while you answer email instead.

I've been doing GTD for 15+ years. I got serious about capture immediately. Calendar, right away. Someday/maybe, easy.

Projects took me YEARS. It's my biggest regret in this whole system, because next actions are tactical. They're two inches of road. Running your life off a next actions list alone is like driving ten miles while only seeing one inch in front of your face.

Put the destination down first. Then build one inch at a time toward it.

Problems are projects

David Allen has one line so good I think about it three times a week:

Problems are projects.

Real example from a class I taught a ways back. Warren runs a property management company. His problem: owners drag their feet sending the documents he needs to onboard their properties. Insurance info, signed forms, all of it. Every week, the same nagging, the same delays. It's a blister on his butt that he's just learned to live with.

Most people leave that as a complaint. We turned it into an end state:

"New owners onboarded with all documentation within 10 days of signing."

Another one. A guy on my team gets ten broken-automation notifications a day and finds out something died when a customer says "where the hell are my resumes?" Complaint. Here's the project:

"A systematic way to proactively monitor the health of Sagan's 500+ automations."

See the trick? You write down what DONE looks like. The result, never the process. "Work on LinkedIn outreach" is process and it will sit there forever. "80% of my assigned members are connected with me on LinkedIn" is an end state, and your brain immediately starts chewing on it.

Then the magic part

Every week, in your weekly review (we covered that last issue), you look at each project and ask one question:

What is the next physical action to push this forward?

That's it. Maybe it's "schedule a brainstorm with the team." Maybe it's "make a list of every account where our automations live." Brainstorming is a fantastic first action, by the way. So is talking it through with ChatGPT on a walk.

Do that every single week and tell me: do you have ANY doubt you'd make progress on that problem?

Hell no. Focus, applied systematically against a defined end state, is basically unstoppable.

Stuff that's secretly a project

Things rotting on your to-do list (or worse, in your head) right now that belong on a projects list:

• Get promoted

• Learn a skill (a language, n8n, sales)

• Hit this year's revenue number

• Fix the process that embarrasses you in front of customers

• Lose 20 pounds

None of those are one step. All of them respond to the same treatment: end state, then one next action per week, forever, until done.

Yallah Habibi,

Jon

P.S. We are hiring like crazy AND building agents like crazy at Sagan

Had a great AI event (for home and professional service business owners) in person last week - lots to follow on that!

Here’s an example of an agent we are building for a commercial landscaper.