a daunting task............................

The value of natural project planning is that it provides an integrated, flexible, aligned way to think through any situation.  Whereas, the basic five-step process of capturing, clarifying, organizing, reflecting, and engaging is a coherent way to achieve stability across the whole spectrum of your life, natural planning produces relaxed, focused control in more specific areas.
     Challenging the purpose of anything you may be doing is healthy and mature.  Being comfortable making up visions of success, before the methods are clear,  is a phenomenal trait to strengthen.  Being willing to have ideas, good or bad, and to express and capture all of them without judgment is critical for fully accessing creative intelligence.  Honing multiple ideas and types of information into components, sequences, and priorities aimed toward a specific outcome is a necessary mental discipline.  And deciding on and taking real next actions—actually moving one something in the physical world—is the essence of productivity.
     Being able to bring all these ingredients together, with appropriate timing and balance, is perhaps the major component of competence for this new millennium.  But it's not yet the norm of much professional and personal behavior; far from it,  It's still a daunting task to apply this awareness to all the aspects of one's life.  The natural planning model is natural, but in many cases it is not automatic.

-David Allen, Getting Things Done:  the art of stress-free productivity