100% agreed.

I’ve always called it ‘next actionable step’ but it’s essentially what you describe: what is the most immediate, effective, efficient thing I can do to run through the process?

And often we’re waiting on things that are out of our control (maybe the next actionable step is ‘wait for Jerry to get back to me’ which is indeed zero stress / brain power by itself) and so those things can either be safely discarded (I find even consciously discarding things is handy, there’s a lot of stuff that feels like a to-do and it weighs on our “I should remember that” brain, but are in fact non-actions and needn’t be there) or easy to convert into a verb like telling your phone to remind you in a few days to call Jerry. Then discard it.

I’d like to write more about this too in the future — it’s something I see my peers struggle really hard with. Efficiency on the whole is never really taught to folks and it’s such a lovely superpower to have. Have more time, do more of what you actually want to do in life.