The Ultimate Time Management System?
Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 15:55 I’ve put a question mark at the end of the title of this post, but I’m going to remove it if the system which I’m about to describe proves to be as good as I think it will.
For more years than I can count I’ve been trying to find a system which will have the following characteristics:
1. Universal capture - you can add all the tasks which you must do, should do or want to do.
2. It ensures that the difficult tasks - the ones that you tend to procrastinate over - get done, done quickly and done well.
3. It processes recurrent tasks (email, tidying, filing, mowing the lawn, paying bills, etc) quickly and efficiently so they don’t build up.
4. It can deal with urgent tasks with an appropriate degree of despatch.
5. The system itself has minimum overhead.
6. The system itself doesn’t raise resistance by forcing you to do things you don’t want to do.
This is the first system I have ever come across, whether mine or someone else’s, that fulfills all six of these requirements.
It is based on an earlier system of mine, Autofocus 4 (AF4). For those of you who remember it, I have only made one structural change to it. The change is that unfinished tasks are now retained in the Old List until they are completed. However you don’t need to know AF4 to understand the new system.
Here are the rules:
1. You have two lists, an Old List and a New List.
2. Start by filling the Old List with all the tasks you want to get done. I suggest you put on it everything you’d like to get finished in the next couple of weeks or so. At this stage the New List remains empty.
3. Start working on the tasks in the Old List. If any new tasks come up you put them in the New List. No new tasks should be added to the Old List.
4. You can do the tasks in the Old List in any order you like. Continue working on the tasks in the Old list for as long as you feel like it.
5. When you’ve finished a task, delete it from the Old List. If it’s a recurring task, re-enter it at the end of the New List.
6. You don’t have to finish a task when you work on it. When you want to stop working on a task in the Old List without finishing it, delete it and re-enter it at the end of the OLD List (not the New List). So tasks remain in the Old List until they are finished.
7. When you have done as much work in the Old List as you want to do for the time being, you switch to the New List.
8. The rules for processing tasks in the New List are different from the rules for the Old List. In the New List you have to do the tasks in the order they are written. For example if you have ten tasks in the New List and you start by doing Task 5, you can’t then do any of Tasks 1-4. Your next task can only come from Tasks 6-10. Unfinished tasks in the New List are re-entered at the end of the New List, not the Old List.
9. Once you have reached the end of the New List, you go back to the Old List and repeat the process from Step 3 onwards.
10. Every time you go back to the Old List, you must work on at least one task. If you do not, every task remaining in the Old List is deleted without being re-entered.
11. When the Old List is empty, the New List becomes the Old List and you start a fresh New List.
The rules sound more complicated than they are in practice. The best way to understand them is to read them through carefully then try them out. After you’ve been doing them for a day or two, read them again to make sure that you are doing them right.
Here are a few suggestions on how to make the system work well for you. Please note they are only suggestions and are not part of the rules:
1) It’s important to keep the lists well weeded so that they contain only tasks which are still relevant. It’s a good idea to have a recurrent task “Weed Lists” in which you remove outdated tasks and those which for one reason or another you no longer wish to do.
2) It’s important to define what you mean by “finishing a task”. Ideally the way the task is phrased should make it clear. Compare:
Read “War and Peace”
Read “War and Peace” Chapter 10
Read 25 pages of “War and Peace”
Read “War and Peace” for 30 minutes
3) If a task comes up which needs to be done immediately, write it down at the end of the New List, stop what you are doing and go straight to it. This is quite in accordance with Rules 4 and 8.
4) I suggest you read right through both lists before starting work each day. This is to allow your mind to get an idea of the relevant importance and urgency of what is in the list.
Reader Comments (74)
But as to Nicole's point, I'm already chasing the end of the New List, LOL! It so happens that I've had some pressing family issues to deal with, so my bandwidth at work has been curtailed. And I can only focus on the most urgent tasks right now. They keep piling up at the end of the New List, and I keep working through them, never getting to the end.
Right now, I can see that it is clearly a short-term problem, and I hope it will resolve itself soon. But since I also have a tendency to over-commit, I see a possible risk here, of always chasing the end of the New List and rarely making visits to the Old List. I'm not sure how the mechanics of the system would flag this as an issue (like DIT does).
Obviously, I could still apply the same corrective (audit my commitments) - the issue is that there is no automatic trigger for that, and no systemic, ongoing way to clearly measure one's overall level of commitment, like DIT does.
I'm still going to try this for a while and see if it becomes a serious issue. There is something very appealing about the fact that the Old List is a standard "closed list" that makes me want to try this.
Actually I see the "chasing of the end of the list" phenomenon as an advantage in that it means that some of the tasks in the New List are also getting dealt with until they are finished. Well, I guess that's the case unless the tasks you are chasing are "Have a sleep", "Surf tv channels" and "Drink six-pack". But we do have to have some conscious control over what we are doing!
And, Seraphim, if you only have time to concentrate on urgent stuff at the moment isn't that exactly what you want your TM system to be giving you?
3. Start working on the tasks in the Old List.
10. Every time you go back to the Old List, you must work on at least one task. If you do not, every task remaining in the Old List is deleted without being re-entered.
I wonder if there is any significant drawback, if you would START first in the new list?
IMHO to start in the new list would be more flexible.
Example1: Before lunch you have an idea or task which you will get into directly after lunch.
Example2: Before leaving the office you rembered that you forgot to do a system backup which take quite a while. You decide to do it first if you enter the treadmill the next day.
If you follow the rules #3,#10 strictly you can't enter the task to your new list, because if you enter the task and do it after lunch (Example1) you would have to delete the remaining old list (in theory ;-)
If you allow to start with the new list you can park your "after-lunch-task" on the new list. You don't have to park it elsewhere (calendar, post-it, etc). I only see the disadvantage, that the task on the old list have to stay in the waitingroom a little longer (but as we know from our visits at the MD - this is annoying, but in the end you will be "processed" - mostly).
I think you are misunderstanding the instructions. When Rule 3 says "start working on the Old List" that is how you start off at the beginning of your use of the method, i.e. immediately after you have constructed your first list. At that stage there is only the one list. There is no New List. It's also what happens when you reach the end of the New List after each reiteration of the system.
It does not mean that you start again with the Old List after each time you take a break. After a break you just continue from where you left off.
If something urgent comes up you can process it in accordance with Suggestion 3, which reads: "If a task comes up which needs to be done immediately, write it down at the end of the New List, stop what you are doing and go straight to it. This is quite in accordance with Rules 4 and 8."
I have also completed today a small item (check if Doctor X bill were paid). This item never were urgent or important enough to complete. But it was just hanging around on my to do list causing emotional overhead and noise. Like a dripping faucet. I finally did it because it was an easy way to reduce my closed list by one. I also immediately felt lighter as this small, but very irritating task, were gone.
<< Actually I see the "chasing of the end of the list" phenomenon as an advantage in that it means that some of the tasks in the New List are also getting dealt with until they are finished. Well, I guess that's the case unless the tasks you are chasing are "Have a sleep", "Surf tv channels" and "Drink six-pack". But we do have to have some conscious control over what we are doing!>>
It's also possible to get into this situation when new work comes in faster than you can handle it.
<< If you only have time to concentrate on urgent stuff at the moment isn't that exactly what you want your TM system to be giving you? >>
Yes, the immediate (and temporary) situation I am dealing with requires me to focus only on the urgent things. And TUTMS? handles this very well.
The potential problem I was raising would happen when this becomes one's usual way of working - chasing the end of the New List because one just has too many commitments and too much incoming new work -- not because one is really under a temporary time crunch.
With DIT, it is pretty straightforward. If you can't clear your list every day, and this continues for just a few days, but then you catch up again, it's no problem -- that's how it's supposed to work -- incoming work and completed work need to balance out, on average. And that's what would typically happen if your commitments are balanced, but you have a temporary time crunch.
But if it continues for more than 3 or 4 or 5 days, or even 7 days if you use DWM's way of handling it, then you need to do an audit of your commitments, because there's a bigger problem.
With TUTMS?, how long is it OK to chase the end of the list? How long is it OK for the total number of tasks on the list to keep growing? Is there an objective point at which one must say "time for an audit"? Is there some way to use the existing rules and get an objective "flag" like this? Or is there a simple tweak that would give you that flag? Those are the questions I am thinking about.
Without an objective flag, I start getting anxious as soon as I spend "too much time" away from the Old List, wondering whether I've got myself overcommitted again. Depending on my mood, "too much time" can mean a couple hours or a couple days. I need an objective indicator that doesn't depend on my mood. :-)
New stuff coming in faster than you can handle it IS the objective indicator that you are over committed. Having more tasks on your list at the end of the day than you had at the beginning is the exact equivalent of not being able to clear your list in DIT. So you can apply exactly the same criteria and exactly the same solution.
Pretty fair comments I think. I'm already on to the Post Ultimate TMS!
Mark, if I may ask...does that mean you've abandoned this AF4-based approach completely (because, presumably, the theory didn't pan out in practice) or that you've just tweaked it?
No to both.
Thanks again for sharing your systems!
More about this soon!
My list remains on my desk, static, and doesn't travel with me. It's not a notebook but a loose-leaf binder with lined A4 sheets.
When out-and-about I write notes on unlined record cards which I then scan into my Doxie scanner at the earliest opportunity. I often take the scanner with me to meetings. It all then goes straight into Evernote.
It's a matter of finding what works for you.
I tried for a while to not apply dates to tasks- by re-defining the tasks and the questions over them - but ended up in the conclusion that my definition of task was askew. A task 'starts at the start - is worked on - & is finished when finished' is my current reckoning, so as soon as I need to apply a date to anything in my TUTMS, it's ripped off the list into the calender. It's my way of acknowledging a commitment over a goal/task (and gets me through lists faster!).
But then Any.do has its "moment" feature and a nice way to maintain lists *and* a schedule with the same task set!
both let me do a dictation to generate a new task, which as a farmer, is my best input method (dont ask what my hands are covered in!:) I input my task into 'today' (the quickest entry) and then shift them to my new list the next morning with the any.do 'moment' - its amazing how often what i thought was a task, wasn't. A few hours to vet the consequences and definition of tasks is gaining importance with me!
Thanks to Mark for your work in this field. I struggled for such a long time to discipline to any old "priority" markers, it so regularly does not apply when I'm working *with and in* the fickle outdoors environment - 'humble-me' assigning priorites on nature? (laughs!)
All of these methods have been far superior in managing not only myself, but my other labour resources too!
Is anyone able to offer a opinion on my two options?
I think your query would get a better response if it were on the General Forum. I've taken the liberty of copying it there.
http://markforster.squarespace.com/forum/post/2161226
This is a French translation of the rules — Enjoy!
Many thanks for everything you have been inventing, testing, posting and improving for years.
Best regards,
Lionel
__
Principes :
1. Des tâches à écrire et à accomplir, au sein de deux listes : une Ancienne, une Nouvelle ;
2. Gardez vide la Nouvelle liste. L'Ancienne, elle, accueille tout ce que vous comptez accomplir dans les deux semaines ;
3. Au sein de l'Ancienne, commencez à réaliser les tâches. Cette liste reste telle qu'elle est : c'est la Nouvelle — et elle seule — qui accueille vos nouvelles idées de tâches ;
4. Les tâches de l'Ancienne se réalisent librement, dans l'ordre et selon la durée que vous désirez ;
5. Quand vous en terminez une, retirez-la (effacez-la) de l'Ancienne. Si elle a vocation à être récurrente, ré-inscrivez-la dans la Nouvelle, à la toute fin ;
6. Terminez une tâche ou réalisez-la partiellement. Dans ce cas, effacez-la et c'est à la fin de l'Ancienne que vous la ré-inscrivez. Ainsi l'Ancienne sert-elle pleinement à stocker des choses en cours ;
7. Quant vous atteignez le maximum de ce que vous pouvez ou souhaitez faire — dans le délai des deux semaines (cf. point 2) —, passez à la Nouvelle ;
8. Accomplir les tâches de la Nouvelle se fait différemment : choisissez une tâche quelconque, puis allez exclusivement vers le bas (par ex., si vous entamez la numéro 4/10, accomplissez ensuite la 5 et la 6, jusqu'à 10). Certaines, même avec vos efforts, demeurent ? Ré-inscrivez-les à la fin de cette même liste ;
9. Quand vous terminez la Nouvelle, retournez à l'Ancienne et faites les choses normalement, en effaçant ce qui est à son terme, en ré-introduisant à la fin ce qui a encore besoin de travail, en inscrivant le récurrent dans la Nouvelle, à la toute fin (point 3 et suivants) ;
10. Toutes les fois que vous retournez à l'Ancienne (point 9), imposez-vous d'accomplir une tâche ou plus. Si c'est trop dur et s'il en reste, effacez ce qui vous résiste ;
11. Quand vous terminez l'Ancienne, la Nouvelle prend sa place et devient officiellement l'Ancienne. Commencez une Nouvelle toute neuve (vide, cf. point 2).
Là, vous consultez les principes à l'écrit. Dans la pratique, ils sont plus simples. Intégrer leur fonctionnement ? Simplement lire, en se concentrant. Et appliquer. Après un ou deux jours de pratique, relisez les règles, pour être sûr que tout est bon.
When you came up with the idea for this modification to AF4, did you consider using the same modification with any of your other systems? Why did you choose AF4? Do you think it might work well with any of the others?
Thanks,
Austin
8. Accomplir les tâches de la Nouvelle se fait différemment : choisissez une tâche quelconque, puis allez exclusivement vers le bas (par ex., si vous commencez par la numéro 4/10, votre prochaine tâche ne peut être que l'une des tâches de 5 à 10, pas les tâches de 1 à 3). Certaines, même avec vos efforts, demeurent ? Ré-inscrivez-les à la fin de cette même liste ;