Judging by the questions that readers ask in the Comments and Discussion Forum, people have a lot of difficulty grasping one of the major advantages of Do It Tomorrow.
This is that it provides a powerful way to check that your work is in focus.
The way it does this is by insisting that you have to be able to process one day’s incoming work per day on average. This is such an important point that I resist strongly all suggestions from users of the system that they should try to schedule some of their current work for dates further away than tomorrow. The reason I resist this is because all it achieves is to disguise the fact that they are not able to keep up with their work as it falls due. They will then be allowing their focus to disperse and the quality of their work will suffer - and so probably will their sense of well-being and control.
Remember that DIT allows a 4 to 5 day rhythm to your work. So if you get behind on your Will Do list for a couple of days, you can catch up within the next couple of days. This is perfectly ok, because the amount of time available on any one day is rarely going to balance exactly the amount of work to be done that day. But it must balance out over a fairly short period.
This is often a problem for people who have multiple projects to juggle. And it is in precisely this sort of situation that it is most easy to lose track of one’s focus. So with regard to major projects here are some principles which DIT offers:
1. Projects without deadlines are best handled one at a time. This is generally speaking the quickest way to get them on-line and earning you money (or preventing you from losing it!).
2. Projects with deadlines should be commenced at the beginning of the time available, not at the end of the time available. This allows you to take advantage of the “little and often” principle and prevents the project being disrupted by unforeseen circumstances.
3. You should aim to be up-to-date with all actions on all active projects. This means that all “next actions” relating to active projects should be in your Task Diary for tomorrow. That represent the real amount of current work which you have. As I’ve said above, any attempts to schedule some of this for further away than tomorrow will simply disguise how much work you have, and lose the benefits of DIT focus.
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