Get Everything Done

Well, I am back where I began twenty years ago with Simple Scanning. The difference is that I have an entirely different philosophy about it - a philosophy which I will attempt to describe in this and subsequent posts.

As I said in an earlier article, there are two ways of looking at a long “catch-all” list.

The first is that you capture everything on your list which you have to do and then use a system to get all of it done. This is what I was trying to do with it all those years ago. And of course I failed.

The second is that you capture everything that you might do on your list and then use a system to sift the list so that the viable things on it get done, and the rest are sifted out. If there is a lot which you don’t do then you have succeeded.

The basic difference between the two is that with the first what you haven’t done is seen as more important than what you have done. In the second what you have done is seen as more important than what you haven’t done.

With the first, if you didn’t succeed in doing something then you would see the possible causes as:

You experienced strong resistance
You couldn’t get yourself in the right mood to do it
You didn’t want to do it
You kept putting it off
You found it really hard
You thought it would be a lot of work
You weren’t sure how to handle it
You just couldn’t get started
You did a load of trivial make-work in order to avoid it

With the second, the reasons would be entirely different

I chose not to do it
It didn’t feel right for me at this time
I decided it would interfere with my existing work
I tried it but it didn’t work for me
I found a better way of doing the same thing

In other words the reasons for the second put you in a positive, not a negative, light. It’s the task which didn’t pass your selection, rather than you who failed to get the task done.

What are the advantages of seeing the list in this way?

I’ll answer that question in a later post in the series.