I started my present FVP list during the evening of 30 May, a bit short of a week ago. So I thought it would be a good idea to show how my list has developed - particularly in view of some concerns which have been voiced about whether difficult tasks would ever get done using the algorithm.
I’ve used the same algorithm all the time I’ve been working this list. I have however varied the question. I started with “What is more exciting than x?” and then changed it to a questionless sort in which tasks were dotted according to whether they “stood out” or not. Currently I think this questionless sort is superior to using a question.
Anyway, here are the statistics:
Total number of tasks entered: 441
Total number of tasks completed: 376
Total number of tasks remaining: 65
I am using a notebook with 31 lines to the page. The pages are not relevant to the sort, but the distribution of unactioned tasks may be of interest.
Number of tasks remaining per page (with cumulative total):
Page 1 0 0
Page 2 0 0
Page 3 0 0
Page 4 3 3
Page 5 3 6
Page 6 2 8
Page 7 5 13
Page 8 4 17
Page 9 4 21
Page 10 2 23
Page 11 2 25
Page 12 10 35
Page 13 9 44
Page 14 15 59
Page 15 6 65
A couple of things to note about this:
1) The first 93 tasks on the list have all been actioned in less than a week.
2) No pages except the last one have more than half their tasks unactioned. (The last page only contains 7 tasks at present).
Yesterday’s tasks (4 June)
I kept a record (by using a different coloured ink) of what tasks I entered yesterday and what tasks I completed.
No. of tasks entered during day: 74
No. of those tasks actioned during day: 40
No. of those tasks unactioned at close of day: 34
No. of tasks actioned from previous days: 22
Total tasks actioned during day: 66
Note that the number of tasks currently remaining on the list (65) is slightly less than the number of tasks I succeeded in doing yesterday (66).