Predicting your day
Sunday, August 3, 2008 at 12:44
Mark Forster in Time Management, Tips and Tricks

I’m trying out a “brilliant idea” which struck me yesterday. For a few days I had been experimenting with the idea of writing out a to do list for the day and then putting it away in a drawer (real or virtual) and only looking at it at the end of the day. The idea was that it would mobilise the unconscious mind to get on with the tasks without the necessity to be constantly referring to the list.

The only trouble with that idea was that it didn’t work. On Friday I managed to spend the whole day without doing a single item on the list. I did plenty of other things but the “hidden list” seemed to repel me rather than attract me to its contents.

So on Saturday morning I was pondering whether to continue with the experiment, when inspiration hit me. Instead of writing out what I felt I ought to do on Saturday, I would write out a list of what I actually thought I would do that day. I then put that list away in a virtual drawer, and found that it had precisely the effect on me that I hoped the original “hidden list” would have on me but didn’t. I found myself doing the things that I had predicted. At the end of the day I had done every single item on the list without referring to it once.

I’m doing the same thing today. And as you can see “Write a blog entry” is one of the things on the list. I also managed to get moving on a whole heap of papers which badly needed sorting.

I’ll be very interested to see how this works out. As always, comments are welcome - particularly from people who would like to try it themselves, or have done something similar in the past.


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