Web Design Tips for Beginners (like me!)

Here’s a couple of tips which you might find useful when you are trying to improve the look of your website:

Have you ever wanted to duplicate an effect on a website but didn’t know how to code it in html? You can find out the code for any page by using a facility on Internet Explorer. Simply go to the View menu and select Source. That will show you the complete code for the current page as a text file. A lot of people don’t know that menu item is there (I didn’t until recently myself) but it can save you hours.

If you ever want to match on-screen colours, there’s a very simple utility called Color Cop which will tell you the code for any colour you see on screen. You can use it to magnify the colours so that you can identify the individual pixels. What’s more it’s free!

Most Popular Articles

The ten most popular articles on this site over the past month have been:

“Do It Tomorrow” - Chapter One

Can I Improve on the No S Diet?

Structuring the Day

To Do Lists — How we hate them!

“Do It Tomorrow” - book review

“I’ll Just Get the File Out”

Focus and Rest

Note Taking Software Progress Report

It’s Like Walking Across a Muddy Field

Top 10 Tips for Keeping Your Life Moving

The 10-Minute Writing Practice

A method of problem solving which I haven’t written about for a long time is the ten minute writing practice. I first came across this in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones (highly recommended) as a way of freeing up one’s natural writing abilities. She saw it mainly as a way of writing fiction. But since my ambitions didn’t lie in the direction of fiction, I quickly saw that it could be an effective tool in the armoury of methods which one can use in order to increase one’s creativity.

The idea is simple. You just write for ten minutes continuously without lifting your hand from the paper. You are not allowed to revise or correct. This is very similar to journalling. The differences are that you normally write about a specific subject and that it is shorter. When writing the three pages in my daily journal for instance I normally take 35 minutes plus or minus. Ten minutes is a much sharper focus.

To use the method, take a problem or issue that is facing you at the moment and just write round it for ten minutes. When I say “write round it” I mean don’t just write about the subject itself, but also write about your feelings concerning the subject, the circumstances surrounding it, its history, in fact anything that comes into your head.

Then when the ten minutes is up, go back and underline anything that represents a new insight, a point for action, something further to investigate, and so on. You will often find that you have some quite valuable points. And even if you don’t, you may find that new ideas come to you spontaneously over the next few days, because you have stirred your brain up to think further about the issue.

This is an effective method and can be applied to a lot of situations. I have in fact been writing in exactly this way to produce this posting. The only difference is that I have typed this to save time, but normally I prefer to do the 10 minute writing practice in handwriting.

The Problem with Deadlines

I remember reading a few years ago that research has shown that if you want your employees to finish projects on time, they are much more likely to do so if you set a series of intermediate deadlines. The result will be not only a greatly increased chance that the work will be completed by the final deadline, but also that the work will be of higher quality.

The research also looked at what happens when we set deadlines for ourselves. Giving yourself intermediate deadlines had a similar effect. If you have given yourself the task of writing a book by 1 February 2005, you are more likely to succeed if you split it down something like this:

Write outline by 15 October

Write rough draft by 30 November

Write second draft by 15 January

Final draft completed by 1 February

However the research found that, although setting one’s own deadlines did have an effect, it was much less effective than having them set for you externally.

The problem with deadlines we have set for ourselves is that our minds know that they are not “real” deadlines. They are just ones that we have arbitrarily set. So, in the above example, as 15 October approaches and we still haven’t done anything about writing the outline, we don’t feel the sense of urgency about meeting the deadline that we would if we had to hand the results in to our boss.

So how can we get the full benefit that comes from deadlines, without having someone standing over us enforcing them?

Here I want to digress for a moment to a boss I used to work for nearly forty years ago. I remember well how, whenever he gave me something to do, he used to ask me “When will you have that done by?” As long as my answer sounded reasonable he would just nod and make a note of my answer. Then he would let me get on with it in my own way in my own time.

When the day came when the project was due he would ask me “Have you finished that job I gave you?” The first couple of times that happened I came up with a hundred and one different reasons why I hadn’t done it yet. He just stopped me in my tracks and said “I don’t want to hear why you haven’t done it. Just tell me when you will have done it.”

Somehow after those first couple of missed deadlines, I was never late for a project again!

Sadly he died recently, but the lesson he taught me all those years ago is still very much alive for me.

So instead of giving yourself an artificial deadline for a project, just ask yourself “When will I have that done by?” Make a note of your answer, and if you haven’t done it by that date don’t bother rehearsing all the excuses about why you haven’t done it. Instead just say “So when will I have done it?”

Exercise:

1. Select a project that it’s important for you to get on with but which doesn’t have a real externally-imposed deadline.
2. Decide when you want to have it finished by.
3. Break it down into several stages, depending on the size of the project.
4. Take the first stage and ask yourself “When will I have that done by?” Write your answer down on your calendar where you can see it.
5. If you haven’t finished by the due date, ask yourself “So when will I have done it” and mark the new date in your calendar. And don’t forget to adjust the completion date for the whole project as well.
6. Repeat as necessary for each stage of the project.

[The original version of this article was published in my newsletter in November 2004]

One Thing at a Time

One of the most important time management principles, to which I have often referred in the past, is “one thing at a time”.

This principle is at its most powerful when applied to getting projects under way. I know that it’s not always possible to be working on only one project at a time, but it’s a lot more possible than we are usually prepared to allow.

What I mean by a project is a desired result that takes a series of actions to complete. There’s no hard and fast dividing line between an action and a project because virtually any action can be turned into a project just by breaking it down further. But basically if you think of a project as a collection of actions leading to a specific result you will not go too wrong.

For the purposes of this article I want to distinguish between two types of project:

There’s the type which involves recurrent activity over a long period, such as learning a language, writing a book, getting fit, etc. The actions are similar to each other, and the effect comes from the regular consistent repetition of the activity. The best way of dealing with this type of activity is to schedule a specific time of day for it every day (or whatever time interval is appropriate). This article is not about this type of project. 

The other type of project usually involves organising something. It consists of a series of separate and distinct activities leading to a specific result. It is this second type of project that I am dealing with in this article. 

You almost certainly have many of this second type of  project that you are desperately trying to find time for. Imagine for instance that you have all the following to get through:

Write report for Client X
Update website
Change your stationery supplier
Research potential new clients
Prepare for business presentation
Implement new marketing strategy
Decide on new pricing
Select next month’s special offers
Edit mailshot
Organise party for clients
Put forward proposals to the board
Deal with records backlog 

Most people faced with a list of projects like this deal with them on the “headless chicken” principle. They rush around doing a bit here and a bit there, constantly getting distracted by whatever is making the most noise at the time. What usually happens is that the ones which have become pressingly urgent get finished, while the others languish. 

Yet by applying the “one thing at a time” principle they can in fact be done quite quickly. And certainly much more effectively and less stressfully than by the “headless chicken” approach.

Here’s how to do it.

First of all list all your outstanding projects. Split really large projects into separate phases. Next decide in what order to do them. The best way to decide the order is by urgency, rather than importance. After all if they are not important, what are they doing on your project list in the first place? You are too valuable to be doing unimportant work.

So after arranging the items by urgency, the above list might come out something like this:

Prepare for business presentation
Select next month’s special offers
Edit mailshot
Write report for Client X
Decide on new pricing
Put forward proposals to the board
Research potential new clients
Design new marketing strategy
Organise party for clients
Update website
Change stationery supplier
Deal with records backlog 

The next step is to ask yourself for each project in turn “If this was the only project I had, how long would it take me to finish it?” And then plot your estimated date for completing that project.

Today is 16 October but you don’t intend to work over the weekend, so 18 October is your first working day. The first project, the business presentation, will take a day to complete so you estimate it will be completed on 18 October. The next project, the special offers, will also take a day so you estimate 19 October. 

After you’ve been right through the list it might look something like this:

Prepare for business presentation          1           18 Oct
Select next month’s special offers          1            19 Oct
Edit mailshot                                        2            21 Oct
Write report for Client X                        2           25 Oct
Decide on new pricing                           1            26 Oct
Put forward proposals to the board         2           28 Oct
Research potential new clients               3              2 Nov
Design new marketing strategy              2             4 Nov
Organise party for clients                      2              8 Nov
Update website                                    2            10 Nov
Change stationery supplier                    1            11 Nov
Deal with records backlog                     3            16 Nov 

So in one month you should have dealt with every project you had on your original list. If you get behind or ahead with the projects, make sure you adjust the estimated completion dates for all the projects. That will help to keep you right on track.

I’m sure you are saying to yourself “Well, that’s all very well, but new projects are coming in all the time. What do I do with them?”

The answer is simple: add them on to the end of the queue! 

If that’s not feasible because the project really can’t wait, then enter it in your list so that the estimated completion date is early enough for the project’s purposes. Change all the completion dates for later projects, and you will then be able to see exactly what effect taking the new project on is going to have on the rest of your work.

TIP: Don’t completely erase the old estimated completion dates when you revise them. That way you keep a record of how many changes you have needed to make. Examining that record can tell you a lot about your workload and the way you are tackling it.

[This article was originally published in my newsletter in October 2004]

Update on Sunday, July 20, 2008 at 12:26 by Mark Forster

My thinking on this subject has changed. See my posting Dealing With Projects That Don’t Have Deadlines.

What is Effectiveness?

One of the really sad things about the world these days is that there are enormous numbers of very talented people who never succeed in creating very much. They are creative but do not create. Very often they are immersed in activities but take very little real action .

I come across people like this all the time. I see self-employed people who have wonderful ideas for their business, but seem to get bogged down and discouraged. I see business managers who are ambitious and capable but seem to spend their lives rushing from one thing to another.

The qualities of creativity and order affect each other very closely. You can be as talented and creative as you like, but if you aren’t ordered as well, you won’t be effective. You will spend your time thinking up great ideas but never being able to make anything of them.

On the other hand your life can be wonderfully ordered, but if it doesn’t contain any creativity it will be sterile – just coldly efficient. You will be one of those people who drive others mad because of your passion for keeping things in their place. You will never be effective because you are more concerned with how things look rather than how they really are.

It is impossible to be effective without both creativity and order. Effectiveness is a compound of other qualities, rather than a quality on its own. You could look on it as a measure of how far your creativity is free to express itself without being hampered by a lack of order in your life.

At the risk of oversimplifying things, you could express the relationship like this:

Effectiveness = Creativity x Order

How might this relationship be affecting you right now?

Let’s see where you are at the moment. Mark yourself out of 10 for how Creative you are and how Ordered you are.

Multiply them together and you have your percentage measure of how Effective you are. For example if you consider yourself to be very creative you might give yourself an 8. If you are rather disordered you might give yourself a 4. Multiplied together these give a score of 32. That means that although you are a very creative person you are only working at 32% effectiveness.

Note that you however hard you work on your creativity you can only succeed in raising your effectiveness to 40%, an increase of only 8 points. On the other hand, if you work on how ordered you are, you have the potential of increasing your effectiveness to 80%, a rise of 46 points. So now it is clear where to put your effort.

You may have been struggling for years against your inability to get ordered. And you may regard this as a deep character fault – something which is innate in you and which you cannot change.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Being ordered has little to do with character; it has everything to do with how your life is structured. If you have a structure which makes it easier to do the right thing, then the right thing is what you will do. If you find yourself consistently doing the wrong thing, it is because the structure of your life makes it easier to do the wrong thing than the right thing. You may have noticed that in certain circumstances you are more ordered than in others. Why? Because the structure is different.

Get the structure right and everything else comes right too.

[This article was originally published in my newsletter in November 2004]

Email Difficulties

A computer crash at the end of last week wiped out my email for the whole of 2007 so far, and when I came to restore the Outlook backup file I found that it was empty. So I learned a lesson there - always check that back-up files actually contain something before relying on them!

If you have emailed me over the last week or so and have not had a reply, please resend your email and accept my apologies for the delay.

The Resistance Principle and Colley's rule

A few weeks ago I said that I was intending to have another go at the Resistance Principle. How have I been getting on with it? Well, the truth is that I found it exactly the same as in my previous attempts. After an initial period of success, my mind started to rebel against it and I found myself most days achieving only trivial tasks - and sometimes not even those.

However I then changed tack a bit. Instead of asking myself “What am I resisting (now this moment)?”, I changed the question to “What am I resisting the most (overall in my life)?” To be able to answer this question satisfactorily, I found it necessary to work off a task list. By marking the resistance I felt to each item on the list out of 100, I ended up with an ordered list of things to be done.

This worked brilliantly in getting some major outstanding projects completed. However the problem with this sort of approach is: “When do the low resistance items get done?” If writing an email to a friend has to wait until I’ve cleared all the items I’m resisting, my friend isn’t going to get many emails from me!

So what I am trying out now is an adaption of Colley’s Rule. For those of you who haven’t come across Colley’s Rule before, it is a method designed by a 19th Century mathematician for making decisions. It enables one to come up with a high quality of decision without all the stress of trying to find the “best decision”. According to the rule you draw up the specification for what you want, i.e. a four bedroom house within two miles of the nearest primary school, etc. and then take the first house you are offered as a benchmark. You do not buy this house, but instead buy the next house you are offered which is better than the first one. This has been shown mathematically to produce a very high quality of result.

You can apply Colley’s rule to all sorts of decisions. I’ve used it myself for such things as chosing a restaurant in a strange town, or deciding what to do on my day off. How can I apply it to the list of items I am resisting?

Well, in this case what I am doing to apply the Rule is to take the top item on my list as the benchmark, and move down the list until I come to a task which I am resisting more than the top item. Once I’ve completed that I take the next item on my list as the benchmark and move down the list until I come to a task which I am resisting more than the new benchmark. I continue working my way round the list using the same principle.

I find that this works very well. It ensures that all the high resistance items get done, while giving a chance for lower resistance items to get cleared too. As items tend to rise in resistance the longer one leaves them, there is a natural balance built into it. Using this method one can reduce the average resistance of one’s to do list very quickly. The lower the average resistance is, the quicker you can get through the tasks on the list.

As always, I want to stress that I am trying this out, not recommending it. That will come later - if it works for me!

Goal Monitoring Update

I can’t say that my scheme for increasing my advertisement income has worked very well. I ended the month with a daily average of $3.44, which was well below my target. On the other hand for the first two days of this month, the average was $7.12, which just goes to show how much the figures vary - especially as the record for one day’s advertising revenue was obtained on a day when I hadn’t made a blog entry for a week.

I’m going to have to go back to the drawing board on this.

On the other hand my diet continues to work very well. I’m bang on target today, which means I have lost 9 lbs. It’s beginning to be noticeable!

Goal Monitoring - Getting Worse!

My daily average has declined again today - this time by only 1 cent to $3.17. So I have to add another 30 minutes, meaning that I have to work on nothing other than advertising income for a whole hour today.

I learned one valuable lesson though - like many of life’s lessons a pretty obvious one - if I am going to influence the measurement of the average for first thing the following day, I need to do the work early in the day so it has time to have an effect on the figures. Yesterday I did the work in the early evening, so it had much less effect on the average than if I had done it in the morning.

Unfortunately today I am out for most of the day, so it’s going to have to be the evening again.

Getting off to a bad start

The first day of my trial of goal monitoring is over and my advertising income average has declined to $3.18. The target for the day is $3.28. That means I now have to bring in a 30 minute slot during the day in which I do nothing except work on improving the average.

I'm not counting writing blog entries as counting towards the 30 minutes. It has to be "behind the scenes" stuff.

Although starting off with a "failure" like this is a bit depressing, it will be interesting to see what I do as a result - at the moment I have plenty of possibilities but haven't made any decisions - and how quickly it is effective.

Back to the Old Colours

Thanks to everyone who commented on the new colours for the site. Since the majority of people weren’t that keen on them, I have decided, as you can see, to revert to the old colours.

Article in London "Daily Mail"

There’s an article on “Beat Your Time Wasters” in today’s Daily Mail (p. 62), which includes some quotes (and misquotes!) from me. It includes a section about Susanne Agerbak, who changed her life dramatically as a result of reading Do It Tomorrow.

“I make a list of what I have to do every day, and I never add to it. It means I get everything done, and I can do it in any order so I don’t spend time prioritising […] I now have time to do more hiking and rock climbing, to learn Danish and take an Open University psychology degree.”

Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be an on-line version of the article on the Daily Mail website so I can’t give a link.

Goal Monitoring - II

Here I am, as predicted yesterday, ready to start monitoring the goal of increasing the advertisement income from this site. At the moment I am going to concentrate solely on Google Adsense income - though it may well be that sometime in the future I will need to increase the scope of the goal to cover all types of advertising.

My task today is to decide what my goal is for the rest of the month. I’m regarding this as a dry run for only a week to shake out any problems with the method.

Ok, we start with the current average daily income for January which is $3.21. Since most of the month has already passed, whatever action I take over the next week is going to be limited in how far it can effect this month’s average. So, bearing that in mind, what would be the minimum target that would challenge me? I think $3.50 would be about right. What would be the absolute maximum target that would challenge me without overwhelming me? I’m going to say $4 though I may be pitching that a bit high.

So my range is $3.50 - $4.00. Using the one third rule, that means my target for this month is $3.67.  I’ve got to raise the average by 46 cents from today’s figure of $3.21. I have seven days to do it in, which means I need to raise it by 7 cents a day (rounded to the nearest cent).

So my targets are as follows (measured at the beginning of each day):

26th  3.28

27th  3.35

28th  3.42

29th  3.49

30th  3.56

31st   3.63

1st      3.67

To remind you: every day that I am below the target for that day I add a 30-minute slot into my day in which I do nothing except work on the advertising income. These slots are cumulative - so if I were to be below the target for three days’ running I would have to work for three 30-minute slots on nothing else. Conversely every day I am below the target I can take off one slot (assuming there are any).

So today as I am exactly on the target by definition I have no compulsory time scheduled. But of course not having a compulsory slot doesn’t mean that I do no work towards the goal. Writing this post is actually an important action towards it. Anyway I can’t wait to see what tomorrow’s figure is!

Goal Monitoring

My diet continues to be both successful and easy, so I am looking at ways in which I might be able to extend the principles to achieving other goals.

First one needs a target which can be measured easily, and which can move progressively to a final goal. The one I immediately thought of was the advertising income on this site. How suitable is that? It’s measurable and it will respond to the right sort of actions. It does however fluctuate madly from day to day so I would have to use some sort of average to measure it. That’s easy because Google Adwords continuously reports the average daily earnings during a month.

So the target is ok. I could use the daily average for January as my baseline and decide on a figure to aim for by the end of February. It would be easy then to plot a steadily rising line which I have to keep to as closely as possible.

How should I chose what the target should be for February? On the principle of maintaining flow, a target should be sufficient to challenge but not overwhelm. So I would need to decide what the minimum amount that would challenge me would be, and then what the maximum amount would be that would not overwhelm me. That would give me a range of possible targets. Where in that range should I set my actual target? According to my friend Michael Neil, the target should be set about one third of the way up the range.  So if my range is between $5 and $8 a day, my target should be set at $6. That sets a good challenge, but leaves room for me to surprise myself.

So that’s the target sorted. Now what is going to be the equivalent of the rules which I set myself progressively in the diet? The diet rules are No Seconds, No Snacking, No Sweets, Small Portions, Skip 1 Meal, Skip 2 Meals, and Skip 3 Meals. These are all about what not to do rather than about what to do. How on earth can I find an equivalent in terms of taking actions that will increase my Google Adwords income?

I think the simplest way is to phrase it negatively again. Each “rule” would be a 30 minute slot out of my day in which I am not allowed to anything other than work on the target directly. So if I am below the target I have to add another 30 minutes, and if I am above the target I can subtract 30 minutes.

Hmmm… will this work? Possibly. I’m not sure whether 30 minutes is the right amount of time. There’s only one way to find out - and that’s by trying. I’ve still got a week left of this month. So I’ll set it up first thing tomorrow morning, and see what I can achieve by the end of the month. It’s really just a dry run to see if the concept will work, and to shake out some of the rules before doing it for real in February.

Keeping on top

I want to expand on something I mentioned at the end of my previous posting: "I think the truth is that we have energy for just about anything that we feel on top of." I believe the above statement is true of just about anything, whether or not it is something that you enjoy doing in itself. Conversely even with things that you enjoy doing, if you are behind on them your energy will suffer. In fact you may be even more frustrated because you will feel that you can't even keep moving on the things you enjoy doing.

A good example of this is doing your accounts. Most people don't particularly enjoy accounts (unless they are accountants of course!) Some people have a positive aversion to them. For someone working on their own in a small home-based business, keeping on top of their accounts is not particularly difficult. There are probably not more than four or five transactions a day. If they enter each item in their account program each day and file the vouchers, they can easily stay on top of their accounts. That means they are able to get instant access to the up-to-date figures for their business's financial state. This is an important management tool. What's more at the end of a financial period, the finalising of the accounts is easy and will take little time.

Whether or not you enjoy accounting, being on top of your accounts in this way is very energising and motivating. It's a very different story with the person who puts off dealing with their accounts day after day, week after week, month after month. They have no idea how their business is doing, they dread the whole process of getting the accounts sorted out, and the end of the financial year an extremely painful time for them. The only difference between the two situations is a few minutes' work each day. So remember: an important source of energy is being on top of things. If you're not able to keep on top of something you should be seriously questioning whether you ought to be doing it at all.

(The original version of this article appeared in my newletter in January 2005)

The Source of Clarity

I suppose I should have expected it, but when I first started teaching the methods in Do It Tomorrow one effect took me by surprise. I started to find that people to whom I had taught the methods suddenly seemed to become much clearer about what they wanted out of life. They got a new confidence and things which had appeared as only unattainable dreams started to enter the realm of the possible. What's more, not only did their goals and vision for the future become much clearer but also their enjoyment of the work and the energy they were putting into it increased as well.

As I said, I guess I should have expected it. The reason why I should have expected it was because that was exactly what happened to me once I had finished developing the methods and started to use them myself. Within what seemed a matter of weeks I had completely changed the way I ran my coaching, taken on more than twice as many clients as I used to have, started a programme of time management seminars and more than doubled my monthly income. What's more I had done it in a way which made it as simple as possible for me to maintain. So simple in fact that I quite frequently take the afternoon off just because I have run out of work!

My own experience coupled with what I was seeing of other people's experience led me to think that the most important factor in moving our lives forward is not so much a strong vision (though that definitely helps!) but confidence that we can deal with the day- to-day demands that our vision imposes on us. If we don't have that confidence we will have great difficulty committing ourselves and maintaining that commitment.

And where did the energy come from? Well, I think the truth is that we have energy for just about anything that we feel on top of - think how much more energy you would have for your daily work if you had absolutely no backlogs!

(The original version of this article appeared in the January 2005 issue of my newsletter)

Reaction to the New Look

The reaction to the new look for my website has been unenthusiastic to say the least. Apart from a couple of encouraging comments the reaction is that it is difficult to read and the colour scheme is not suitable for the contents.

So why haven't I gone back to the previous colours?

Because both the traffic on the website and the advertising revenue have shot up since the change. And since I can't see any other reason why they should, it's just possible that the new colours have something to do with it.

It's also just possible that it's a pure coincidence, of course. But in order to be sure I'll delay the decision whether to change back for a while yet.

Nothing to Report

Nothing to report on my diet.

That's quite unusual, isn't it? Aren't diet reports supposed to be full of moans about hunger, confessions about bingeing, and alternating despair and elation about the latest weigh-in?

No, sorry. None of that. I seem to have got used to the amount of food necessary to keep more or less to the target weight. Occasionally I have to use a rule or two, but basically it's just steady progress downwards and I eat what I feel like.

Very boring -  I need some drama to keep the readers coming!

Full details of the diet I am following can be found here.

High Intensity To Do List

My absence over the last couple of days has had nothing to do with a failure of the Resistance Principle. I have simply been in bed with an unpleasant, but fortunately brief, touch of the flu. That's put me a day behind on my work at a time when I have several important deadlines coming up.

I had the interesting experience of being switched by the Resistance Principle this morning to another method of working. This is an intense method that I keep in reserve for when I have a lot of work which I have to get through in a relatively short time.

This technique is based on the one of the methods I describe in Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play of working in bursts of continually increasing length. I start with a burst of five minutes and then increase it by five minutes each time, so that the progression goes 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 minutes and so on for as long as it takes to finish the task. By the time one has got as far as completing a burst of 40 minutes, one has had three hours total exposure to the task - in a very concentrated format.

This is quite a sledgehammer approach to take to a task. There are few tasks, however difficult or unpleasant, which won't succumb to this technique. I am of course talking about office-based tasks. I don't imagine one would gain very much by using burst to do tasks like shopping, digging a ditch, carrying out a site inspection or going for a run. Actually come to think of it going for a run in bursts might work quite well!

As an example, I am now in the middle of my second burst on this blog entry. Having had a previous five minute burst (which didn't leave much time for writing after deciding on the subject, opening the word processor, etc, etc), I am now half-way through a ten-minute burst. I will continue burst by burst until the entry is finished. Though in this case I doubt whether I will need more than three or four bursts.

In the gaps I do another task using the same burst technique. Currently it is clearing my in-tray of paper. Since it hasn't been cleared for two days, there's a fair amount in it. So it too will be ground down bit by bit by the burst technique.

To decide which two tasks to alternate between, I'm using an interesting variation on the standard To Do list. What I have is an open-ended list to which I'm adding tasks as they arrive. Then I alternately take the first task and the last task from the list. Of course once I've started a task I stick with it until it is finished.

This is an unusual mixture of FIFO (first in, first out) and LIFO (last in, first out). It means that stuff that needs dealing with quickly gets done, while the stuff that tends to sink to the bottom of a list gets done too. However fast or slow one progresses through the list, one can be sure that it will all get done.

This is not a method that I would normally use for longer than a few days at a time. It is simply too high intensity. It also lacks the very important check that the "Do It Tomorrow" method gives about balancing one day's incoming work with the next day's outgoing work. Of course there is nothing at all to stop one from using the burst method with the Will Do list from "Do It Tomorrow". That can be very effective on days when you find your attention is flagging.