Tuesday
Feb072012
The Final Version - first look
Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 13:09
Here are some never-before-seen photos of the first and last pages of an actual FV list, or to be more exact the only actual FV list in existence.
The loose-leaf format is not essential. Any sort of notebook, paper or electronic will do just fine.
Reader Comments (121)
Glad to see you are making progress, Mark, and evidently feeling good about it. I am looking forward to more.
The dot in the upper right corner is just a page number I deleted because I decided it wasn't needed.
Well, that was my main reason for making this post.
Must...
Not...
Guess...
but...
Wait...
For...
Book...
More power to you Mark.
Have you put any thought into proofreaders for the book? I already bought the other 3. I'd be glad to proofread this one for just $20. If I had to pay more than that, I might as well wait and buy it when it comes out :-)
<< Have you put any thought into proofreaders for the book? >>
Sorry to disappoint you, but I typed all three of my books myself, and I don't think the publisher's proofreaders found any mistakes in any of the three. They were basically published as far as the basic text is concerned exactly as I typed them.
@leon: Oh, you can, even with AF, SF, and FV systems. Just process them often enough so that they all get pushed to the last page.
(I'm not aware of the exact FV system, but I think the end-of-list entry point hasn't changed from previous systems. Confirmed by the photographs.)
@will : As you wish...
Dots = next-pass markup ?
Lines = making not yet processed tasks stand out ?
Wow Mark, this is impressive. I do business writing for a living and it's rare to find someone who can do this, so well done! I have all three of your books and haven't noticed any errors either. Have you got a target date for publishing yet?
Do you often see proof readers willing to pay for the privilege?
<< I am excited about FV. However, I have to ask, how is FV superior / more conducive to productivity than Superfocus? >>
The main difference is that both SF and AF tend to result initially in the minor/easy tasks being processed first, while the "squeeze" is only put on the more difficult tasks gradually. In FV this is not the case.
An associated problem with SF/AF is that there is a tendency for the list to get packed with easy tasks which give an illusion of progress. What is actually happening thought is that the easy tasks on a page get dealt with quickly, while the more difficult tasks only get dealt with a few at a time. So typically a new page will have 30-40 per cent of its tasks dealt with on the first couple of passes, but in later passes the proportion of tasks will fall dramatically. This results in a large number of active pages.
In FV there is no pay-off for packing the list with easy tasks, so the length of the list is dramatically reduced. The processing of tasks is much more even throughout the list, with the result that the list tends to be concentrated on a few pages (my current list has 4 pages, but there are only 2 tasks each on the first and last pages).
Also unlike SF/AF, the FV list is dealt with as one list. The page divisions are not significant (and in electronic versions are not needed at all).
No will - it's usually the author who pays for proofreading! However it is obviously a service that Mark is happy to perform himself!
<< This looks and sounds great, Mark. Do you have a target date when all of your loyal followers will see your new book? >>
I'm planning to do a lot of the writing while I'm away in Australia next month. Back 12 April!
A random thought that just occurred to me is to leave some lines after a hard task that can be filled with easy tasks related to that hard task. Maybe leave 4 blank lines. This way when it's time to work on the hard task I have to come up with an easy task first. Once I complete four easy tasks then I can move the hard task to the end of the AF4 list, again leaving a few blank lines after it.
Seth Godin remarked (I forget where/when) that this problem is inherent with all task management systems.
I think Steve Pressfield (War of Art), Julia Cameron (Artists Way), Stever Robbins (Action Days), S. Covey's (Weekly Planning/Roles/Goals, Ziglar/Godin (4 Pack) & Mark's dreams all have something to say about meaningful progress.
Thank you for all your work on these systems. They are very helpful for this engineering student. I'm looking forward to reading your book when it is published.
In the meantime, are you willing to divulge whether the dots on your list here relate to the urgency of those items?
Thanks,
Austin
<< are you willing to divulge whether the dots on your list here relate to the urgency of those items? >>
No, they don't relate to urgency as such.
<<No, they don't relate to urgency as such. >>
From looking at all the clues---the pictures, the latest blog entry, the blog entries on importance and urgency---I would guess that the dots are actually related to IMPORTANCE, not urgency.
The latest blog entry says that, with respect to difficult vs easy items, FV's "processing of tasks is much more even throughout the list." Initial sorting or tagging of items by importance fulfills this: no matter how easy or difficult an item is, if you can't "put up" with it not being done for too long, then you'd ought to do it.
This tagging also fits well into Mark's latest definitions of importance and urgency: "If the answer to any of these questions ['How long can I put up with something?'] is 'indefinitely', 'never' or 'I don’t know yet', then you can remove the project from your list for now" (markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2012/1/30/how-do-we-tell-how-important-a-task-is.html ). Conversely, if items are important enough, they ought to be worked on first, prioritized by urgency, and the initial way to do this (aside from listing them in a separate list) is tagging them, e.g. a dot.
Of course all of this is just speculation, and of course there are still some unanswered questions. First of all, if all of these are correct, then how does Mark tag the "important" tasks? And second, how could the system be "designed to produce the right load for the time available, but it is also designed to ensure that this load consists of the right stuff. Not only that, but in the process goals will be clarified and worthwhile emerging new ideas exploited to the full" (http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2011/9/19/key-principles-of-the-new-system-ii-universal-capture.html )?
Oh well, I guess we'd have to wait for the book :D
Oh no, no no no no no no no no no...
No way, Mark, FV's THAT simple? No way!
1. Make list. Add new items as without the dot.
2. From beginning of list, pass through list thinking “How long am I prepared to put up with not doing this task?” If the answer is some time less than "indefinitely" or maybe today or some time soon, then mark it with a dot. Do this until you reach the end.
3. Go back to the beginning and process just the tasks with dots, the Important tasks, according to Urgency (how much time you have).
4. Once a specific event is triggered (get to the end? no action taken on last pass of the Important tasks?) go back to step 2.
No way this is right!
http://www.markforster.net/blog/2007/2/5/the-resistance-principle-and-colleys-rule.html
<< I would guess that the dots are actually related to IMPORTANCE, not urgency. >>
No, not as such.
<< if items are important enough, they ought to be worked on first, prioritized by urgency, and the initial way to do this (aside from listing them in a separate list) is tagging them, e.g. a dot. >>
No.
<< 1. Make list. Add new items as without the dot. >>
Yes.
<< 2. From beginning of list, pass through list thinking “How long am I prepared to put up with not doing this task?” If the answer is some time less than "indefinitely" or maybe today or some time soon, then mark it with a dot. Do this until you reach the end. >>
No.
<< 3. Go back to the beginning and process just the tasks with dots, the Important tasks, according to Urgency (how much time you have). >>
No.
<< 4. Once a specific event is triggered (get to the end? no action taken on last pass of the Important tasks?) go back to step 2. >>
No.
<< a Colley's Rule implementation >>
Good shot! Colley's Rule does come into it, but not in a way that bears much resemblance to the article you reference.
One point - the system has changed a lot since my earliest drafts, so things I've said in the past about it may not necessarily still be valid.
Ans: <<No, they don't relate to urgency as such.>>
One thing is for sure: Mark would be a cross-examiner's nightmare on the stand... :)
To be honest Mark, I'm quite relieved that my guess is wrong ^___^
And please Mark, could you put a nice section of the new book where you give us ideas and ways to use it to optimize our decision making in the course of our lives?
Other concrete ways not confined to what is included in FV :)
Like some stories about you deciding for the best restaurant to choose and you experience with that, whether you use it for mundane or consequential things etc
Hope you have a fantastic time in Australia, Mark.
BOTTOM LINE (so you don't have to skip to the end ;)
Compared to a single random pick, Colley's Rule doubles your chances of hitting the narrow top percentiles while sharply throttling your chances of hitting the corresponding bottom ones.
In the middle ranges, there is a nice payoff, e.g. if you want to land in the upper half, Colley's Rule gives you a 75% chance, vs. the 50% of a single random pick.
By quartiles, the breakdown from highest to lowest is: 44%, 31%, 19%, 6%.
Your chances of achieving "mediocrity" (middle two quartiles) are exactly 50%.
ANALYSIS
Consider N items of random rankings, and list them in a histogram from lowest-ranking to highest. Note that you will not encounter them in ranked order when executing Colley's Rule, but for analysis, the histogram of outcomes will be drawn in rank order. Draw the height of each histogram's bar to represent the number of outcomes obtaining that item. The leftmost item will have no bar (zero height), because Colley's Rule never obtains the very lowest item, since it always obtains something higher than your first pick. The second-lowest item will have a height of one, meaning that the only outcome obtaining this item is to pick the very lowest item first and then happen upon that second item next. The third-lowest has two outcomes: You might first pick the lowest item or the second-lowest item, followed by picking the third-lowest item. You can see that the very highest item has N-1 outcomes, by picking any of the other N-1 items first and then happening upon that very highest item next.
We can now find probabilities for any single item or group of items by adding up their bars and dividing by the grand total of all bars. The whole enchilada is a stair-step pattern from 1 up to N-1, whose bars sum to:
(N-1)*N / 2 = total number of all outcomes = sum of all bars
Similarly, the sum of the first m bars is:
(m-1)*m / 2 = sum of bars 1 through m
So, the probability of obtaining any of the first m items is:
m*(m-1) / (N*(N-1))
Now, just let N go really large, and express m as a fraction of N—say, u=m/N:
P(lower u) = u*u, where u is a ratio from 0.0 to 1.0 (e.g., u=1/3 refers to the bottom 1/3)
P(above u) = 1-u*u
NUMERIC RESULTS
2% chance of landing in the top 1% (above u=99%)
19% chance of top 10% (above u=90%)
44% chance of top quartile (above u=75%)
75% chance of top half (above u=50%)
19% chance of 2nd-lowest quartile (bottom half minus bottom quartile)
6% chance of bottom quartile (lower u=25%)
1% chance of bottom 10% (lower u=10%)
0.01% chance of worst 1% (lower u=1%)
GENERALLY ...
2*e chance of landing in a small upper "e" percentile
e-squared (tiny) chance of landing in a small lower "e" percentile
QUARTILES (isn't this fun?)
44% top quartile
31% 3rd quartile
19% 2nd
6% bottom
MEDIOCRITY
Your chances of hitting the middle half (2nd and 3rd quartiles) are precisely 50%.
EXTENSION
Well, then ... suppose we made a third cascaded pick? I.e., after encountering that second item, keep looking for a third item to beat the second. Roughly, we would have a parabolically rising staircase instead of a linear one, and the probabilities would have a steeper cubic shape, pushing us further toward the top. If you are really looking for gold or strongly averse to junk, the payoff would be worth the small additional effort.
Erm! Ok!
I think I forgot to say in the article that you take as your benchmark the first house (or whatever) that meets your specifications. Therefore by definition you would already have a satisfactory result even if you bought the benchmark house and it was the worst example available.
Bear in mind that with the sort of items it is usually used with, houses, cars, restaurants, job offers and the like there is unlikely to be a huge number available that meet your specifications. So adding another pick may simply result in your running out of choices.
Let's say you expect 5 acceptable job offers. There's a 1/5 chance that the best one arrives first -- and you reject it. You then reject offers 2-5 because they're inferior. If you know there will be 5, that's fine -- when #5 arrives you take it. If #5 never comes, though, you're stuck.
Ideally, the rule include something to prevent this. Maybe "after x offers, lower your standards to the 2nd best seen so far."
Then there's Paulo's Rule. You reject more than one, then take the best. There are some simulations, but I lost the page. Paulo's was better than Colley's, but the testers didn't agree on the "win" criteria, or on how many to reject.
I like Feynman's Dessert Method: Always take the chocolate. It may not be the best thing on the menu, but it's probably pretty good. Besides, it's only dessert.
<<I think I forgot to say in the article that you take as your benchmark the first house (or whatever) that meets your specifications. Therefore by definition you would already have a satisfactory result even if you bought the benchmark house and it was the worst example available.>>
Sure, you did mention that, and I took it into account. Here is how my analysis applies to the house scenario:
Before shopping, you make your list of specifications. At the moment you finish the list, there are N houses that meet your specifications. You don't know where they are, and you don't have them on an itemized list, and you don't even know the value of N, but they exist right at that moment in your neighborhood (or whichever neighborhood(s) you listed in the specifications), and there are N of them, whether that is 5 or 500.
Now you go out shopping. The first house you discover that meets your specifications is the "benchmark" house. In my writeup, it is that "first pick" which leads to the histogram bars. Mathematically, you have just drawn from N lottery tickets. Physically, you have arrived at the first of N pre-existing acceptable houses.
You leave that house, per Colley's Rule, searching for a second house that is more desirable than the benchmark. At this moment, there are N-1 or fewer remaining houses that meet your specifications *and* are more desirable (to you) than the benchmark house. Again, you don't know what this number is, nor do you have a list of these houses, but they exist, and there is some definite number of them less than N. By continuing to shop until you find your first house more desirable than the benchmark, you are now drawing from a second lottery, in which certain tickets have been removed. The remaining tickets correspond to all the houses of the original N that you would find more desirable than the benchmark. Physically, you trudge through additional houses that were never represented by lottery tickets, but they don't need tickets, because you were never going to draw them.
The above leads to the staircase histogram, which results in all the rest of my figures.
<<Bear in mind that with the sort of items it is usually used with, houses, cars, restaurants, job offers and the like there is unlikely to be a huge number available that meet your specifications. So adding another pick may simply result in your running out of choices.>>
I did play around with small sample sizes, and actually the results are much the same. I just didn't write up the small samples, because the mid probabilities vary so much with N.
Let's try N=6:
P(top 1 of 6 houses)=33%
P(top 2 of 6 houses)=60%
P(top 3 of 6 houses)=80%
P(2nd worst of 6 houses)=6.7%
P(worst option)=0%
("worst" = least desirable of the houses that meet your specifications)
Not bad! Again, Colley's Rule doubles our chances of hitting the top, versus a random pick. Had you merely selected your first acceptable house, you'd have played Russian Roulette. Instead, just by discovering one more acceptable house, not even seeing two-thirds of the acceptable field, you have given yourself an 80% chance of landing in the top half of desirability and nearly a 2/3 chance of top third.
Again, I realize all six of these houses are acceptable, but the purpose of Colley's Rule is to make a quite nice choice with a minimum of comparison effort. I am measuring its success by looking at its odds of selecting our most desirable options. It remains quite effective at that for low N.
<<Let's say you expect 5 acceptable job offers. There's a 1/5 chance that the best one arrives first -- and you reject it. You then reject offers 2-5 because they're inferior. If you know there will be 5, that's fine -- when #5 arrives you take it. If #5 never comes, though, you're stuck.>>
A very good point, but it is not exactly a flaw in Colley's Rule. The problem is the time dependence, the fact that you have to reject the benchmark before looking at other options. That is not a problem in Mark's house scenario, though I guess in a competitive real estate market, your benchmark *might* get snapped up while you are looking for that second house. Hopefully you would get on with it and find that second house (or give up) quickly, so the benchmark would still be available. Perhaps even put a small deposit on it. I think we were able to reserve our house for 24 hours without putting down any money at all.
But if you must firmly cancel the benchmark before you continue, then the small numbers certainly cause trouble. Mark did mention job offers in passing, so yes, we need to watch for that before running with Colley.
But if we apply Colley's Rule to a to-do list, then certainly the benchmark is not going to disappear on us.
Those of you in computer science will recognize the similarity to sorting/ranking algorithms. And all of us on this board will notice the applicability to perfectionists' troubles with decision making.
In a classic ranking problem, we want to find the highest value among N items. The perfectionist (or 100% accurate computer program) needs to find the *best* answer to this, which requires N-1 pairwise comparisons (among the acceptable items alone; if you count the rejections of non-acceptable items, it is somewhat more, but they do not count against the N). For N=6 houses, the perfectionist must discover and visit every acceptable house, keeping a running "winner" in his mind, and always updating the winner upon reaching a better house. After examining the final house, the perfectionist buys the absolute best one.
I don't pretend to know Mark's mind on how this applies to a to-do list, and I'm not fond of guessing (though I'm willing to be entertained by others' guesses!), but here is one example of how Colley's Rule can help a perfectionist when facing a to-do list:
You have 73 items on a multipage to-do list, and you want to pick the perfectly very best, tip-toppest one to work on right now. Your specification is merely "an item on this list." You must make 72 comparisons. Start at the beginning, scan to the end, keeping a running winner.
But given Colley's Rule (and maybe a shot of whiskey), you can take the first item as your benchmark and just scan until you meet a better one. Statistically, you can expect to scan half the list, 36 items instead of 73, before finding a better one. If there is trouble starting at the "first item" because there is too much structure (non-randomness) at the end/beginning of the list, then turn to a random middle page to begin your search, wrapping around at the end.
This gets better, of course, if you have a real specification, such as "items that I pre-marked with a dot because they're urgent" or "items that feel ready to be done," etc. Then you will make even fewer comparisons, because it will take much less effort to reject the items that don't meet specification.
Not that we have any perfectionists around here, at all, but if I were one of them, I might be really excited about applying this rule ... right now ... as I choose a new local bank. Specification: no monthly service charge, conveniently located ATM's, no fee for OFX download, offers Health Savings Account ... I have a pile of brochures. Maybe I don't need to read *all* of them!!
<< This gets better, of course, if you have a real specification, such as "items that I pre-marked with a dot because they're urgent" or "items that feel ready to be done," etc. Then you will make even fewer comparisons, because it will take much less effort to reject the items that don't meet specification. >>
Colley's Rule applied to a pre-filtered ToDo list.
Hmmm...(looks at Mark's list)...hmmm.....very interesting :)
@Frank: <<Colley's Rule applied to a pre-filtered ToDo list.
Hmmm...(looks at Mark's list)...hmmm.....very interesting :)>>
Which is what I am trying to work up it with at the moment, but the pre-filtered list is DWM2:
http://markforster.squarespace.com/forum/post/1677525#item1725184