Second Day of Testing

How did it go yesterday?

I started off by returning everything (email, paper, etc) back to zero. This isn’t necessarily the best way to start the day - especially if you are not confident of getting to the important stuff. But it does give you a sense of being on top - which, as I often say, is a good way of energizing yourself.

The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed that I cheated. In spite of the fact that this is supposed to be a test of a no-list system, I did have a list of things to do - namely the list of intended tasks on yesterday’s blog post. Of course this is not really cheating at all. A statement of intention for the day is an extremely useful device - provided it doesn’t become a catch-all list. In fact the shorter it is the better - just the two or three main things you want to accomplish is sufficient. Don’t include any of the routine stuff which you would (or should) do anyway, and absolutely nothing of stuff you may or may not every get round to doing. My list yesterday was longer than the ideal - but that was for the benefit of you the readers. I was however conscious that the list was influencing what I was doing in a way I wasn’t entirely happy with.

And today?

Again I’m lucky in having no appointments today. In fact the same is true of most of the week ahead (how did that happen? - it’s most unusual)

And tomorrow?

I have a lecture to attend which will take up the second half of the morning. Apart from that, nothing. Another chance to get a fair amount of work done.

Things I want to achieve today:

I’m not going to produce a pre-action list of any kind today. I’ll just do whatever comes into my head in genuine no-list fashion. But so you can see what I’m up to, I’ll publish a post-action list as I go along. I’ll do it on a separate post though so it’s easier to follow. I think this will give a clearer picture of what the system is like in action. Though please bear in mind that reporting what I’ve done as I do it is quite a heavy load in itself and slows the system down to a measurable extent.