While planning to move to Japan, a dream whose fulfillment has taken a year and a half from inception to reality, I kept an ever-growing and morphing to-do list of things I knew I would have to eventually tackle.

Whenever thoughts came to mind like “I’m going to need a Japanese phone number, how is that going to work?” I’d put it down as a to-do item and then basically forget it. Later, I’d idly revisit and rearrange items on the list. When the time was right for me to address one, I did.

Here is the list I eventually ended up with, in chronological order of completion. Note: often items later in the list began much earlier and took a very long time to complete.