You now have a big list of tasks that are ready to start! This is where most task management methods more or less stop. As far as they are concerned the next step is for you to pick something and start doing.

Don’t. That would just be back to you doing retrieval with the worst tool for the job. The next step is organizing, as preparation for a decision. So now you’re going to review each task again and attach a few simple facts to each task, facts you already know. The deciding happens later, and by the end of this guide, it will be an efficient, organic process you will barely have to think about.

There are no big ideas to wrestle with here. You already did the hard thinking in Part 2 figuring out what the next action was. This is bookkeeping, one task at a time. Every fact below is something you already know without deliberating.

That’s the general idea of this entire part, you are not deciding, you are describing. And describing is easy, because every fact you record is something you already know. Which project does this serve? How much does it matter to that project? Is there a real deadline? Is anything stopping you from starting it right now? What do you need on hand to actually do it? These are all things you used to have to think about every time you looked at your list; now you’re going to document them once and leverage that data to make better decisions from here on. None of those questions should require hard decisions. They just ask you to write down what’s already true.

Each of those facts does one of two jobs. Some help the system rank a task’s value, how it stacks up against everything else competing for your attention. Others help the system time a task, whether it’s even eligible to be worked on right now, or should stay hidden until later, or is coming due. Ranking and timing. That’s all the metadata is for, and together it’s everything the system needs to hand you the right task at the right moment without you going to look for it.