This is the sixth post in the “Actually Doing It” series, where I’m documenting what I discover as I build my own estate-planning vault using the process described in the book If You Need to Step In. When I first started filling out the forms, I assumed I would simply move through the vault chapter by chapter until everything was complete. That seemed like the most organized approach. In practice, though, it quickly became clear that the process doesn’t work that neatly. Real life has a way of interrupting even the most orderly plans.
One small detail influenced the way I approached the work. I wasn’t sitting in my office surrounded by filing cabinets and records. Most of the time I was working on my laptop in our den. That meant the documents or information I needed were often somewhere else in the house, on another computer, or buried in a file cabinet. When that happened, I had a choice: stop working and go hunt down the missing information, or skip that section and continue working elsewhere.
This article is part of a larger framework explaining the stages of getting your affairs in order. If you’re new to the topic, start with The Stages of Getting Your Affairs in Order.
Working in Passes Instead of Chapters
Early in the process I decided that stopping every time something was missing would quickly drain my momentum. Hunting down one document often leads to three more tasks, and before long the original work session disappears into a completely different project. Instead of forcing myself to finish each chapter before moving on, I started skipping around between chapters and filling out whatever information was readily available.
Some sections were easy to complete immediately. Others required additional research, documents, or confirmations that I didn’t have at my fingertips. In a few cases, it wasn’t just that the information was hard to find—it wasn’t clearly documented anywhere. That turned out to be a normal part of the process, and something I describe in more detail in The Moment You Realize Information Doesn’t Exist. By allowing myself to move between chapters, I was able to keep making steady progress rather than getting stuck on a single missing item.
The vault gradually began to fill in, not in a straight line, but in pieces.
The Risk of Skipping Sections
Of course, skipping around introduces a different kind of problem. When you move past unfinished sections, there is always the risk that you won’t remember to return to them later. Without a way to track those gaps, the only reliable way to detect missing information would be to go back and review every form in the vault. As the number of completed forms grows, that quickly becomes inefficient.
Using ToDo Files to Track Incomplete Work
To solve that problem, I started adding a simple ToDo file inside some of the chapter folders. Whenever I encountered something that required additional work—finding a document, confirming a detail, or downloading a file—I recorded it there. The list didn’t need to be complicated. It was simply a short set of reminders about items that still required attention in that chapter. A typical entry might be something like “Download latest insurance policy PDF” or “Confirm beneficiary on IRA.”
This small adjustment allowed me to continue working without worrying about forgetting something important. Once the unfinished task was written down, I could move on to another section of the vault knowing that the issue had been captured somewhere visible.
Why This Reduced Anxiety
In reality, the ToDo files probably didn’t make the process significantly faster. What they did was reduce the mental load. Instead of relying on my memory—or periodically reviewing every form to see what might be missing—I could rely on the ToDo lists to hold those unfinished tasks for me. That made it much easier to stay focused on the work that could actually be completed during that session.
How Momentum Changes Over Time
Another interesting shift happened as the vault slowly started to fill in. Early in the process, some of the more tedious chapters felt like obstacles that slowed everything down. They were the parts of the project that made the work feel larger and more complicated than it actually was.
Later, once most of the vault was already in place, those same unfinished items began to feel different. Instead of speed bumps, they started to look like the final steps needed to cross the finish line. The psychology of the work changed as the amount of remaining work became smaller.
A Multi-Pass Process
Looking back, the biggest lesson from this stage of the project is that completing the vault is rarely a single linear effort. It is much more natural to work through the information in multiple passes. The first pass captures whatever is easy to document immediately. Later passes fill in missing details, locate documents, and tighten up the information that wasn’t available the first time through.
Trying to force a strict chapter-by-chapter process can make the work feel heavier than it needs to be. Working in passes keeps the project moving forward while still allowing unfinished items to be captured and resolved later. As long as those gaps are recorded somewhere visible, steady progress becomes much easier to maintain.
The vault structure and forms I’m working through come from the process described in If You Need to Step In. If you decide to build your own vault, you’ll probably run into many of the same small adjustments along the way.