I’ve been distracted from my revisit of Autofocus after one very productive day working it. The reason for my distraction is that my attention got drawn back to a post I made in 2008 about Predicting Your Day, which I’d entirely forgotten about. There were two follow-up posts to it, in which I described how using the method I had not missed a single task for a period of eight days.
And then the follow-ups stopped.
So did they stop because Predicting Your Day had spectacularly crashed, or because I’d got distracted onto something else? Trying to remember back thirteen years is difficult, but knowing myself as I do I think that getting distracted is the more likely. Besides I usually own up to spectacular crashes!
What this means is that Predicting Your Day is a system which has never been tested to the full. And wouldn’t it be great if it did work consistently in the long term? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a system in which you just write down a list of what you think you’ll actually do that day, put it in a drawer, and at the end of the day find that you have magically done everything on the list?
Yes, it would.
So would you like me to tell you how it’s done? I already have. It’s as easy as what I’ve just written. But notice the wording. You write down a list of “what you think you will actually do that day”. Not “what you want to do that day” or “what you ought to do that day”, but what you predict you will actually do that day.
Anyway, read the article and the comments from readers who tried it, and if you are as intrigued as I am have a go at it.
That’s it. I’ve just completed the “Write Blog Post” task I predicted I would do!
12.30pm Update. Work on my list for today started at 10,36 with the writing of this blog post. The list contained 37 tasks and I’ve completed 17 of them - nearly half - in a couple of hours. So very successful so far.
4 pm Update. Only 12 tasks to go. The eight I’ve done this afternoon were bigger tasks than the ones this morning. The remaining ones are smaller again, so I will have no excuse for not finishing.