The purpose of yesterday’s Productive Day Challenge was not to show how superior I am to other people. I am naturally disorganised, lazy and procrastinating - and I have no godlike powers of any sort. Far from it.
The purpose was to show how much one person can achieve in a day using a powerful time management system. And the message is that anyone can do the same if they use exactly the same methods as I did. You can easily verify it for yourself by writing out a similar list and putting the methods to work. But you do need to use exactly the same methods. I’m not claiming that the methods I used are the only methods that can achieve the same sort of results, but what I am saying is that if you use any variation whatsoever on what I did then you are not using the methods I used to achieve the results.
Apart from a couple of items, everything I wanted to achieve during the day was already on my normal everyday list, which has about 60-70 tasks on it. I worked off this list in the normal way. So I did not make any special preparations for the Productive Day, nor did I work in any way different from a normal day.
During the day I did not feel any resistance or sense of pressure. I just carried on working the system according to the rules. When I wrote the definition of what would make me consider the day to have been productive, I had a pretty good idea already of how much I could do in a day. So I had no real doubts that I could get everything on the list done. At the end of the day I didn’t feel tired or exhausted. I felt just the same as I feel at the end of a normal day. In fact this was a normal day.
Things I didn’t do
I didn’t bother to ask the question mentioned in the rules. Experience is showing that it’s quicker and just as effective to select the tasks without asking the question. Just go for what feels ready to be done.
I did not use electronic means. Paper and pen is faster and has less administrative overload.
I did not use any special markings or groupings. These all add to the administrative overload - better off without them.
I didn’t worry about finishing. I knew that the list was within my capability, so I just relaxed and got on with it.
I didn’t let “inbox zero” slip. Building up backlogs is the best way of bogging yourself down. I emptied all “inbox” tasks (email, Evernote, paper, comments, and doing the dishes) multiple times during the day.
I didn’t try to mark up (“dot”) too many tasks at once. The fewer the dots the more flexible the list.
I didn’t confine myself to what was on the Productive Day list. I actually did quite a lot of other tasks as well. I also exceeded my target amount for several tasks which were part of the Productive Day.