task base on material

This is especially true in knowledge work¹, as if you can line out output of a session of research, you perhaps don’t need to do it anyway.

Generally, It’s hard to predict or be sure of what would be the result of a piece of work, or assume that it would went exactly as expected.

You may think “this chapter would fit into a piece of paper”, and ended up solving 20 dependencies with 10 pages of notes.

You can always decide what to process, how much to process: “I’m going to process 20 captured ideas ”, “I’ll read these 5 papers”, or even “I’m going to review my notes for 30 minutes”.(as time is a material too).

You have to prepare your material, sort your material out before the task any way, for the task to be excutable. Link with the task just enough material is intuitive way to control the scope of it

A natural break would always happen after a natural segment of the material is finished, like a chapter, a paper, when the continuity of content is broken. This break could be useful to check up things such as agenda, time used, or working habit you are tracking.