One example illustrates how the facets can work together. Remember the report you’re waiting on someone to review, you create a task to follow up with them on their progress. That task will use several facets at once. First, it belongs to a project (grouping). You’ve decided that its impact is medium. You set a start date for the earliest you will follow up with them, so it stays quiet until then and resurfaces exactly when it’s time to follow up. And since you need this by the end of next week you add a due date to make sure you follow up with them and that they still have time to complete the review if it has not already been completed. Lastly, you tag it “computer,” since you will follow up with them by firing off an email. One task, four facets, each doing its small job. We’ll turn this into a full follow-up rhythm in Part 5; for now, just notice how naturally the facets combine to help drive decision making.

For each task you answered small, local, easy questions: What’s this part of? How much does it matter to that? Is anything stopping me from starting it? Is there a real deadline? And, if you want the extra granularity, what do I need in hand to do it? Every answer was something you already knew. That’s the point of describing instead of deciding. Now you can build a system that uses the information you provided to help you stay focused on the most important things while not letting anything slip between the cracks.