Wednesday
Feb172021
"Get It Right Keep It Right" Progress Reports
Wednesday, February 17, 2021 at 23:30 If I’ve counted right there are twelve entrants in the Lenten Challenge, including myself, who have put Get It Right Keep It Right as the method they are going to keep to for the duration of the Challenge.
As I’m particularly interested in how this particular method works for people, could those using it please put comments on how they are getting on in the comments to this post please.
Comments on how people are getting on with other methods should go on the previous post (Lenten Challenge Entries).
Reader Comments (57)
Today, though, I'm mostly caught up on everything (that will last for a perfect 20 minutes) and so it's the perfect time to ask The Question, write down two tasks, and commence breaking down those resistant tasks.
Thanks to michael for resurrecting Mark's old blog post on "use checklists to beat procrastination" blog; that actually helped get me unstuck on something.
I've got to admit that I'm still struggling a little bit to understand the contents of a long list, the little and often principle, the "do it for as long as I feel like", and the idea of discretionary time being managed by the long list as a "time management system."
To put it simply, let's just categorize tasks into one of leisure or work. Leisure could be tasks like eating, drinking, resting, watching youtube, reading forums, blogs, &c., And then there is the work stuff, which are various projects, whether personal or professional that represent things that produce value or that you do in exchange for money or are things that otherwise keep the wheels spinning (such as cleaning out the office or the like).
Here, I'll put the key difference between leisure and work is that leisure activities, for the most part, are not the sort of things that are *essential* to maintaining forward momentum in your life, perhaps with the exception of eating, but I'm including that here because the act of eating for me can often be a leisure activity rather than a required activity done for continued survival. Work activities, on the other hand, have some level of necessity attached to them because if I don't do these things with some degree of regularity and consistency, bad things happen, or, put in a more positive light, the degree to which my life gets better over time can at least be assumed to be relatively proportional to the amount of quality attention that is put into the "work" categories.
The problem I'm having is that you would, at least from the way I understand it, want to put your leisure activities (the discretionary time ones) onto your long list, because these are things that you are committed to doing (such as a hobby) and that bring you enjoyment, and are not something that you would want to give up. Obviously your work items also go on the long list. They all represent commitments, and I wouldn't want to go without my leisure activities, but I also can't give up my work activities (partly because I enjoy some of them, but also because they keep me able to do things I enjoy in the future, since, for instance, I get paid by those activities).
Now, the problem I see here is that I don't understand how one would keep things in balance. If I follow the little and often and the "do it as long as you want" or really any other "time management" strategy at some level is, well, what on earth will motivate me in the moment to stop doing the leisure activities sufficiently often to let me do significantly more work activities?
For example, say I've got a highly addictive forum, or video game, or YouTube, or book, or something else that I really want to read and work with. Well, I could easily spend 2 - 10 hours at a stretch just doing that one thing, without once feeling the desire to stop. And maybe I might be able to go 1 to 3 hours at a stretch on my work task that makes me money. But if I just work a long list and do things along that list, it's very likely that I'll just end up spending significantly more time on my leisure activities than I would on my work, to the point where the work probably wouldn't get done to a sufficient level to ensure long term success.
I guess the question comes down to, how do you avoid the procrastination on getting sufficient amount of work done while also feeling that you aren't being jipped on your "play time" and *still* get to bed at a reasonable hour?
At least for me, there are so many things to study in my leisure time that I never feel satisfied with the amount of attention that I'm giving there, but I also never feel satisfied with the amount of attention that I'm giving to my work either. The long list system seems to encourage me to spend too much time on procrastinating on my real work because the real work is harder by spending too much time on the interesting novelties that are my leisure work.
One solution might be to cut out things that are taking up too much time, such as YouTube, but at the same time, that strikes me as unsatisfactory. I want balance here, not total depravation. Isn't that the whole point of a time management system? The results for me, far too often, are that I simply try to push more hours into the day, and choose not to sleep.
I've tried timeboxing, but that doesn't seem to work because it's just an artificial limit I'm putting on myself. Why should I listen to some stupid rule that I made up for myself?
This seems to me to be the biggest issue with almost all time management systems I've seen: in the end, once the time management system stops me from "having fun" or "doing what I want to do" then my mind says, "This is just some stupid set of rules you made up, you can break them, too." My system might tell me that I should do X, but why should I even bother listening to it? I'd rather do Y, even if I know in the long term it won't be very good for me. How on earth are you spposed to deal with that?
<< My system might tell me that I should do X, but why should I even bother listening to it? I'd rather do Y, even if I know in the long term it won't be very good for me. How on earth are you supposed to deal with that? >>
My answer to that is to ask why you do any work at all. Why not just spend all your time on the leisure activities you enjoy? Wouldn't life be much more fun?
Once you've answered that question, you might be on your way to finding an answer to your question.
Thanks! I'll definitely be thinking about it.
On another note, you mentioned indirectly the "system" around the time management system, which are things that happen automatically or that are organized and managed outside of the TMS. Do you have anywhere where you document how this whole system of systems fits together in your mind? From what I can tell the components are at least:
1. A calendar for tracking appointments, dated reminders, and other time-dependent things.
2. An authorized commitments list.
3. A daily structure of at least regular sleep and wake schedule and eating schedule.
4. Journaling, awareness, self-reflection habits.
I imagine that most of #4 could either be put on a calendar or in the list, but it seems to me that you might suggest putting it on the list instead of trying to schedule it, since it's technically discretionary, yes?
I think I understand #1 and #2 reasonably well, but I wonder if you might expand on #3 in terms of a daily structure. There are many people in the self-management space that strongly advocate for scheduling and timeboxing, but I get the distinct impression from your writing that you tend to emphasize the opposite, that of minimizing your scheduled time and maximizing discretionary time. However, it seems like you also don't believe in *no* structure, so, what do you think is the right structure to one's time (daily, weekly, or any other time span, really) and how does one go about determining this? What's the principle here that requires something to be structured vs. just intuitively actioned on a list?
<< what do you think is the right structure to one's time (daily, weekly, or any other time span, really) and how does one go about determining this? >>
People's individual circumstances and characters vary so much that it's impossible to come up with the "perfect structure" which will fit everyone.
But I think the main principles to apply for one's own individual circumstances are contained in these articles:
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2006/9/7/structure.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2007/2/15/the-role-of-structure.html
Btw this discussion is now hidden away in the second page of a blog post's comments, and is becoming quite difficult to get to. I suggest that if you want to take it any further you should start a new discussion on the Forum.
This is probably not the fault of the system itself; it's more that I have a lot of projects and tasks that need to be done;
some have a definite (or self-imposed) deadline and others can wait;
some require that other people are borne in mind and others are purely personal to me and won't affect other people;
some need to be got right (often from a state of severe backlog) and kept right, while others are up to date but need to be kept that way.
These factors would be in play whatever time management system I'm using, but I'm starting to feel that GIRKIR may not be that system. However, I'm happy to be proved wrong, and having got this far with the Lenten challenge, I'm going to keep at it.
<< I've got quite a few tasks that no longer feel relevant: they definitely need to be got right and kept right, but not necessarily in the next couple of days >>
Those are prime targets for weeding. You shouldn't have anything on your list which you don't want to be working on at the moment. You can put them back on the list when the time is right.