Predicting Your Day

Yesterday I started to revisit a very successful system from 2008, which I left after about a week to follow other ideas. Although it worked brilliantly and never let me down once, for some reason I’ve never come back to it.

The system in question is Predicting Your Day. You can read the instructions for yourself, plus the two follow-ups (which are clearly linked). But in summary, the idea is that at the beginning of the day you write down a list of what you predict that you will do that day. You then work for the rest of the day without reference to the list. The result the first time I tried it was astonishing, and it continued to work well for the whole time I used it.

Late yesterday afternoon I came across it while searching for something else and decided to have another crack at it. The results were just as astonishing as before. I put twenty-three tasks on the list, and had done all but two or three by mid-evening without once referring to the list. I then had a quick look at the list and finished the remaining tasks in no time at all without looking at the list again.

This morning I started first thing with 64 tasks on the list and at 08.45 I have already done 15 and am working on the 16th (this blog post). 

The most notable thing about this is the speed at which this all gets done. I find myself going from one task to another without any resistance or time spent deciding what to do.

Right, that’s done. It’s 08.52. What’s next?

Comments

[avrum]

There's clinical observation and research to suggest that less anxious people/families make better predictions (and respond with better accuracy) than higher anxious people. I'd imagine your exercise above - over time - could strengthen one's ability to accurately predict what one is capable for one day. Perhaps that spreads to improving one's ability to predict other areas, and thus lowering chronic anxiety** in the process.

** Chronic anxiety is primarily generated within relationships. Acute anxiety is fed by fear of what is; chronic anxiety is fed by fear of what might be. Worry, which is almost always about what might be, can be one clue to how much chronic anxiety a person is dealing with.

Taken from: http://www.anxiety.org/bowen-family-systems-theory-how-anxiety-spreads-affects-loved-ones

[Alan Baljeu]

I’m in!

Avrum, I read out of your post that this ought to work for low-anxiety people and fail for chronic anxiety types because they are bad at prediction, yet you think it would be helpful for the anxious.

[avrum]

Hi Alan.

<<work for low-anxiety people and fail for chronic anxiety types>>

I don't think in terms of fail or pass. Rather, more challenging, less challenging. And regardless of background, everyone has chronic anxiety.

[MrDone]

Hi mark, have you thought about not having any lists at all for a while? Perhaps this blog post proves you may not need one. Rely on visual clues of what need to be done, etc.
With your creative brain it might generate a new line of systems….

[Alan Baljeu]

That is an interesting idea indeed. As a simple application, instead of making a list of housekeeping chores, you could just walk through the house and tackle anything that Stands Out. Your house is an implicit List.

This concept can be extended to a virtual environment defined in your mind, which you walk through and address tasks you "see" at each station. I don't know this would be better than a paper list, but this approach has the benefit that our minds are extremely good at remembering things stored in this fashion. All the memory competition people use this sort of approach.

Back to the tangible world, you could imagine arranging your things such that tasks stand out or don't just by looking at the things. Put a paper on a desk, or have a book pulled out a certain way to highlight something about it that needs doing. Put a rake by the back door. "If it's not away, it's a task."

p.s. day 2 of predicting my day. I'm liking this.

[Lenore]

Alan said: "instead of making a list of housekeeping chores, you could just walk through the house and tackle anything that Stands Out. Your house is an implicit List."

I do this all the time and find it much more effective than a list. I call it "puttering." Interesting ideas about extending it to puttering around the stations of my mind or around my office. Thanks for the inspirations!

[Mark Forster]

Lenore:

<< I do this all the time and find it much more effective than a list. I call it "puttering." >>

I think the butler in Barry's "The Admirable Crichton" describes very much the same process, and he ends up running the show. But I can't find the reference. Maybe you (or someone) can.

[Mark Forster]

Lenore:

I haven't been able to find the Crichton reference - short of reading the entire play. But I in the process I did come across an article on the subject in Psychology Today:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-introverts-corner/201811/the-profound-pleasure-puttering

[Lenore]

Thanks, Mark! I didn't realize that puttering was a thing for others too. And I had never heard of the Barrie play. Would love to hear more.

[Mark Forster]

Lenore:

I did in the end scan rapidly through the entire play and couldn't find the reference. I'm either thinking of another play or possibly of the 1957 film version starring Kenneth More.

The only Barrie play anyone has ever heard of these days is "Peter Pan", though he wrote loads. I'm particularly fond of "The Little Minister" myself, which stared as a novel, then was dramatised as a play and many years later became a film. The play ran in America from 1897 for 300 consecutive performances, making Maude Adams into a star earning $500,000 a year. You can find a very short audio clip of her in the play on Youtube.

[Chris Cooper]

I haven't been able to find the Admirable Crichton quote on the Web - even after replacing "puttering" with "pottering", which is the idiom I grew up with.

It's a long lifetime since I saw the film. I enjoyed the US trailer on YouTube. The film's American title is "Paradise Lagoon", and in the same spirit the trailer promises the film will show us how "a gentleman's gentleman, cast away on a desert island with four luscious dames, manages to keep them all happy!" - presumably by puttering or pottering from one to the next.

Chris

[michael]

But also "learning to tolerate the discomfort of doing things imperfectly becomes a kind of self-improvement project in itself." - http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jun/26/struggling-to-achieve-perfection-this-nautical-metaphor-might-help

[Deb Hayden]

Puttering can be fun. A time game I like that quantifies wandering around was suggested by Alan Lakein, early TM person. Do something different every five minutes for an hour. While this works for making progress doing chores (five minutes in the kitchen, etc.), I remember one he always added: "Jump for joy."

[Aaron Hsu]

Mark, how easily do you find yourself able to stick to this method? Is it something that's relatively easy to do in the short term but hard to sustain long term? Is it as "addictive" as some other methods?

[Rain Perry]

I have a question about this system! At what point do you look at your list? Would it make sense to review the whole list in the morning, and then close the notebook and predict your day?

[Alan Baljeu]

I would say Look when you're not sure what is left to do. This goes for both your prediction list and any long term list you might have.

[Aaron Hsu]

I'd like to point out that Mark apparently revisited this system in May of this year as well, and also spent about a week on it then, and *also* didn't really post any conclusion, nor was there any report of any "epic failure".

Since the same thing seems to have happened again this time around, my tentative conclusion is that Predicting Your Day is a method that appears to, at the least, work spectacularly well for Mark for at least a week, but that it maybe works a little too seamlessly, and he gets bored with it, and then starts to pursue other things.

I also find it very interesting that in all three cases, Predicting Your Day has been "colocated" with thinking about AutoFocus. The first time around, AF came shortly after Mark introduced PYD, and the second time, PYD was an interlude between an extended AF trial, and the third time around, Mark had been extoling the virtues of AF1 to me in the forums a couple of weeks before.

Coincidence? Probably, maybe, perhaps?