Please note: This post assumes a knowledge of both the “Do It Tomorrow” (DIT) and the Day-Week-Month (DWM) time management systems. If you don’t have this knowledge please don’t bother to read it!
One thing that’s becoming increasingly clear to me as I work the new DWM system is that it is not just close to DIT, but actually is DIT.
To see this, let’s examine the statistics which I published in my previous post on February 5th:
Feb 6. 0 (36)
Feb 7. 0 (46)
Feb 8. 0 (50)
Feb 9. 0 (40)
Feb 10. 1 (43)
Feb 11. 16 (62)
Feb 12. 25 (42)
Remember that in DIT you enter all tasks by default under tomorrow’s date with the idea that you take action on them tomorrow. There are however two important exceptions to this. One is that you can enter urgent tasks “below the line” so that they are done today instead of tomorrow. The other is that you can allow yourself to get behind by 4 or 5 days. If you get further behind than that you are supposed to audit your commitments.
If you look more closely at the statistics qyoted above you can see that DWM has kept completely to these principles, except that it has moved the entry point one week into the future. February 12 was where tasks for “tomorrow” were added, and February 11th was today’s list. February 10 consisted of one task which had got behind one day. The 17 tasks shown as already completed on February 12 were the equivalent of DIT’s urgent tasks entered “below the line” today.
Feb 6. 0 (36)
Feb 7. 0 (46)
Feb 8. 0 (50)
Feb 9. 0 (40)
Feb 10. 1 (43) = DIT’s “Behind by 1 day”
Feb 11. 16 (62) = DIT’s “Today”
Feb 12. 25 (42) = DIT’s “Tomorrow”
The only real changes to DIT, apart from the method of entry, are:
1) There is now no need to make a distinction between “same day” tasks and “everything else”.
2) The rather nebulous audit procedure in DIT has been changed into an automatic dismissal process.
I’m sure you will be asking “What about DWM’s 1-month entry point?”
Well, all the 1-month entry point is really doing is adding a pre-screening process to DIT. Instead of relying on the audit to weed out unnecessary tasks, there is now a process by which anything can be added to the list but is weeded out automatically if it no action is taken on it within one month. It also means that anything that gets on the 1-week list has had at least some preliminary action taken on it. There will of course come a time when unactioned 1-month entries co-exist on the same page as new 1-week entry tasks, but there is unlikely to be much confusion between them.