Autofocus: The Book Selection

A couple of days ago I posted about how I was going to test the autofocus abilities of the system by deliberately overloading it with a list of 57 books which I hadn’t got round to reading. How did I get on?

I could have posted about this before but I delayed because I didn’t want to distract from the important business of setting up testers for the new system. The reason I could have posted about this before is that the system took less than a day to sift through the books and make a selection of five for me. The weird thing is that the selection (a history of Islam, a textbook about better driving, a novel, a devotional book and a history of the events leading up to World War II) is far better balanced than I would have come up with by myself.

This is the amazing thing I am finding out about this system. Although very simple, it succeeds in balancing the rational conscious parts of my mind with the intuitive and feeling parts to produce results which I could have arrived at no other way. Just about everything I know about time management has gone into this system and the result is something so easy and obvious that it’s difficult to see why it took so long for anyone to think of it.

New Developments: Testers Wanted

Ok, this is what you’ve all been waiting for!

I’m asking for volunteers to beta test my new Autofocus time management system. Click here to see all past (and future) postings on the subject.

To volunteer, all you have to do is this: enter your email address in the “Sign Up for my Email Newsletter” box in the right-hand margin, and then on the page that comes up tick the box marked “Beta Testing” and press the Submit button. (If you are already a newsletter subscriber you won’t see the tick boxes, but just press the Submit button and you will be sent an email which will allow you to sign on). If you are receiving this message through an RSS feed, you will need to follow the link to the website in order to do this.

The instructions will be sent out on a daily basis to new subscribers.

How to Get Any Project Up and Running

Here is another article I wrote some years ago. This formed the basis for the concept of the Current Initiative in “Do It Tomorrow”.

Do you have lots of great ideas for projects but never get round to starting them?

Do you have a host of old projects that you got so far with and then ran out of steam?

Or do you find yourself saying things like “I really must do some more marketing, but I can never find the time”? (Translation: “I’m not doing the really important work because the less important work is more important!”)

I’m going to tell you a method now which will enable you to give any project your best shot. I can’t of course guarantee that your project will succeed, but at least if you use this method you won’t fail because you have let yourself down.

But be warned: you can only use it on one project at a time!

The basic idea is simplicity itself. You can keep any project moving powerfully forward if you take some action on it first thing every day.

Let’s analyse that a bit further. There are three elements:

1) Take some action

2) First thing

3) Every day

Let’s deal with each of those in more detail.

1) Take some action

You need to take some action, not just think about taking some action! It doesn’t matter how small the action is. The important thing is to get started. I’ve written before about how a simple phrase like “I’ll just get the file out” can be the trigger for getting into a difficult or daunting task.

How much action do you need to take? It doesn’t matter. Just as long as you take some action, it will keep the project alive. When people come to me with writer’s block, I usually set them the the target of writing for at least 10 minutes every day. Al Secunda in his book “The 15-second Principle” makes it even less — he says a minimum of 15 seconds work a day on any project will bring it to fruition.

Of course Al is not telling you to work for only 15 seconds. He is telling you to work for at least 15 seconds. Once you have succeeded in getting started, most days you will go on and do some significant work on the project. But even if you don’t do more than the minimum, you will have kept the project alive in your mind and you will find that you naturally get into the swing of it in the next day or so.

2) First thing

In my book “Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play” I give an exercise in which you are asked to select one task that you are going to do the next day. If you succeed, you then select a slightly more difficult task for the next day. If you fail, you select an easier one.

This sounds an incredibly easy exercise, but the truth is that most people find it almost impossible to keep it going for more than a few days. Yes, it’s rather a horrifying thought — most people are incapable of selecting just one new task a day and doing it without fail!

Your project is going to get lost in the same way unless you make sure that you do it first thing before doing anything else. You know exactly what will happen if you don’t do it first thing. You will find yourself late in the day saying: “It’s nearly time to stop work and I haven’t done a thing about that project yet. It’s not worth doing anything now. I’ll give it a really good go tomorrow.” Guess what happens tomorrow!

I have learnt the hard way that if I want to carry out some particular task every day over an extended period — such as writing, going for a run, whatever it may be — it has to be got under way before I have my breakfast, before I make a cup of tea, before I look at the newspaper. If you work in an office, then the task needs to be started before you check your e-mail, before you talk to your colleagues, before you listen to your voicemail. The second that you say “I must get started on that project, but I’ll just check whether there’s anything new in my in-box” you’ve lost the battle!

Once you’ve got going, you will find that most days there is a natural tendency to keep going. And if some days there isn’t, so what? As long as you’ve done something, you will find it is easier to do more the next day. And that brings me on to my next point.

3) Every day

When someone tells me that they are stuck on a project, the first question which I ask them is “When did you last do some work on it?” Invariably it turns out to have been weeks ago.

Once you stop working on something, it will start to die. Think of your projects as house plants which need watering daily. They don’t need a lot of water, but they do need some. If you forget to water them for one day it won’t be fatal, but forget to water them for several days in a row and they will start to wither. Yet sometimes even the most dead-looking plant will revive if you resume the daily watering. And so it is with projects. If you have a project in your life which is really stuck, try doing some work on it first thing every day and you will be amazed to see how it starts to move forward.

When I say “every day” I mean every working day. For some personal projects you may want to do seven days a week, but for most work projects five days a week is fine. There may be days during the week when you know you are not going to be able to do any work on the project. You might for instance be away at a business conference. The important thing is to identify these days in advance. And what’s the first thing you do when you get back into your office after your conference? Yes, you’ve got it!

On days which you haven’t identified in advance don’t accept any excuses from yourself. The most common justification that I hear is that an “emergency” came up. I’m not saying there aren’t occasional unforeseeable life-or-death situations in which you have to take immediate action to avoid a catastrophe. But be honest with yourself: how often does that really happen? Most of our so-called “emergencies” aren’t emergencies at all. They are simply situations which we have neglected so long that they have come back to bite us.

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So there you are: that’s it. Follow the principle of taking some action on your project first thing every day, and you will be amazed to see how the project comes to life and progresses almost like magic. But remember what I said at the beginning: you can only do this with one project at a time!

So how do you decide which project you are going to use this method on? Ask yourself some questions, such as:

What’s the project that I have been putting off longest?

What am I most stuck at?

What would make the greatest difference to my life and work?

What would really take my life or business forward if I took action on it?

Concentrating on one project at a time is a very good time management principle. You may remember that old music-hall turn, the Chinese spinning plates. The performer has a huge number of bamboo rods and the aim is to get a plate spinning on the end of each rod. A good performer can get thirty or more plates spinning at the same time. The way it is done is to get one plate spinning properly, then to move on to the next plate, then to the next. Go back to an earlier plate only when it starts to wobble.

It’s exactly the same in your life or business. Get one project up and running properly before you take on the next. That is far the best way to move forward.

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Reading this article won’t make the slightest bit of difference to your life unless you do something about it. What you need to do now is to decide on one project which you are going to do first thing tomorrow and every day thereafter until it is fully up and running. If you want to reinforce your decision, feel free to e-mail me ( mf@markforster.net ) to tell me what it is, and I will e-mail you in two weeks time to ask how you got on!

Review of "Get Everything Done"

There’s a very positive review of my first book Get Everything Done on the Simple Dollar blog. Well worth reading, especially if you’ve not yet read the book!

New Developments Update No. 4

A final word on the six items that were left over from Friday. Three of the items were completed today, and three were rejected by the system. The rejection of items is an essential part of the new method and is one of the ways of keeping one’s focus - it makes the need to carry out an audit a la DIT unnecessary.

So the breakdown of the 66 new tasks taken on on Friday is:

Completed Friday: 36

Completed Saturday: 24

Completed Sunday: 3

Rejected: 3

New Developments Update No. 3

I’m finishing for the evening now, but before I go I promised to let you know how I got on with the 30 new tasks from yesterday which weren’t actioned that same day.

I completed 24 of them today, leaving 6 still outstanding.

That means that of the 66 new tasks put into the system yesterday, 55 per cent were done on the same day, 36 per cent were done the next day, and 9 per cent are taking longer.

By my calculations that means that the average time to action each item is less than one day (bearing in mind that some items come in late in the day, and some get actioned early in the day).

Not bad!

Autofocus

One of the things I hope to get out of my new time management system is “autofocus”, that is to say the system itself will automatically focus on what is important and relevant to my life (and how I want it to be) without my having to spend time consciously sifting or selecting.

To test out whether this is really going to work, I’ve decided to torture-test the system by putting into it in one go all the books I have been meaning to read but haven’t yet got round to. The total comes to 57 books (and those are just the ones in my office!)

I don’t think there’s any other time management system in the world (including my own previous ones) which any sane person would contemplate deliberately overloading with 57 books. What I am hoping will happen is that the system will select for me the books that I most need to read at this moment and reject the others - without my having to make conscious choices.

If it can cope with this then it ought to be able to handle other projects in a similar way.

I’ll keep you posted!

Future Developments Update No. 2

One further word on how I’m getting on with the new method: today I had 66 new tasks of which I completed 36. That means that I achieved a same-day completion rate of 55 per cent.

That is much faster than “Do It Tomorrow”, in which only urgent items are allowed to be done the same day.

I’ll update you tomorrow evening on how many of the remaining 30 items I succeed in completing tomorrow.

Future Developments Update No. 1

How have I been getting on with the new time management method that I blogged about yesterday? The answer is extremely well. I’ve deliberately been throwing everything I can at it to see how easy it is to overwhelm the system - and so far I haven’t succeeded in overwhelming it at all.

I started testing the system about half-way through Wednesday (17th) and so far have actioned 193 tasks, which works out at approximately 77 tasks per day. At present I have 50 active tasks (including writing this posting).

More soon!

(Phew! only 49 tasks to go!)

To Do Lists - How We Love Them!

I wrote this article many years ago, long before I had developed the ideas in “Do It Tomorrow”. Yet since there is still much good advice in the article, I thought it worth re-posting it.

Personally I have never been a great fan of to-do lists. If they work for you, fine, don’t let me put you off. But I know I am not alone in finding them very difficult to manage.

The theory behind a to-do list goes something like this. First thing in the morning before you start anything else, you write down everything you have to do during the day (or even better do this as your last action the previous day). You then go carefully through the list and work out what order to do the items in the list. There are various methods of prioritising the list, but they all boil down to some form of balancing urgency and importance.

You can add items during the day as they arise, and allocate them appropriate priorities.

Then all you have to do is take action on each item in their prioritised order. Any items you have not actioned by the end of the day are carried forward to the next day’s list.

The advantages of a to-do list are obvious: everything is prioritised; you know exactly what to do next; things which are urgent and/or important get done first; items don’t get lost; and you have somewhere to write new things as they arise. What’s more it’s ideally suited for computerisation. What could be better?

There is only one disadvantage of a to-do list. It doesn’t work!

There are two main reasons why it doesn’t work. The first is that you never get more than a third of the way down the list. The second is that for every item that you cross off the list, you think of another three items to go on it.

The result is that you end up with a huge, growing, indigestible lump of unactioned items which gets tranferred day after day. Many of these will never become urgent or important enough to get actioned. And yet if they don’t need doing, why are they on your list in the first place? First rule of time management: the question is not what priority something is, but whether it needs doing at all.

Now as I said earlier, I am not a great fan of to-do lists and never use them myself. But I am aware that many people like lists and like the satisfaction of crossing items off them. If you are one of these people, then here are some suggestions about how to make your list work better.

Keep your list on paper, not on a computer. There is something too clinical about computerised lists. They do not engage the whole mind in the way that a handwritten list, complete with crossings out, alterations, creases and general dog-earedness does.

Don’t rewrite your list every day. Keep the same list going. That way you will become acutely conscious of how long items have been on it. The trouble with re-writing your list is that you lose the sense of history that comes from all the above-mentioned crossings out, etc.

Be extremely selective about what you put on the list. This is crucial. The key to a good to-do list is that you only put on it what you actually have time to do (and that means time to do allowing for all those “unforeseen” interruptions that happen every day without fail). That means that you must sift items before you put them on the list, not after. That will force you to keep your total work-load well under control.

Have a separate place to record new ideas. When you think of something new to do, don’t write it straight onto your to-do list. Items should only go on your to-do list after they have been subjected to rigorous assessment as mentioned above. On the other hand it’s important not to lose new ideas, so keep a separate list of “possible” actions.

Keep items small. Ideally an item should be small enough to be done in one session. So don’t put down “Write Project X report”, put down “Write outline for Project X report”.

Don’t prioritise your to-do list. This is heresy I know. But think about it. Prioritising things by importance implies that some things are not going to get done at all. If everything on your list really needs to be done, does it make any difference whether an “important” item is done before a “less important” item? It’s a bit like someone barging to the head of a queue because they are an “important person”. If there are enough “important people” the rest of us will never get served. Frankly the best order to do things in is the order they present themselves.

Cherrypick. In the real world of course it’s not either possible or desirable to do things strictly in the order in which they present themselves. So a useful technique is to go through your list actioning the items you feel like doing at the time and ignoring the others. However it is very important to go through the list in order so that you look at every item on the way. Don’t just randomly pick items from the list.

Always start from the beginning of the list. Whenever you come back to your list after a break, always start again from the beginning. That is where the oldest items are. Each time you come back, you will knock more of these items off. This is where keeping the same list on paper with all the crossings out which that entails can really help you. Crossing off an item is a satisfying feeling. Tearing up a completed page is a really fantastic feeling!

Use the same techniques on your mail box and your in-tray. The reason we tend to build up backlogs of e-mail and paper is because we cherrypick new items and never get back to the old items we have ignored. The solution to this is to reverse the order in which we deal with our mail. Re-order your mail box so the old e-mails are at the top. Then every time you deal with your e-mail, start from the top and work down. When you deal with your in-tray, take the papers out of the tray and turn them over so the old items are at the top. Simple!

Future Developments

I’ve been officially retired since November 24th, my 65th birthday and am already bored with the whole idea! As a distraction I decided to see if I could develop a new time management system which would remove some of the constraints involved in implementing the “Do It Tomorrow” system.

In particular I wanted to achieve the following:

• Keep the advantages of using closed lists, especially in the way they help one to draw impetus from “structured procrastination”;
• Introduce the advantages of open lists, which include fast processing of minor tasks, repetitive tasks  and urgent items;
• The ability to throw everything at the system without its collapsing under the weight;
• Everything gets treated the same, instead of having to treat different degrees of urgency in different ways;
• Even simpler to implement than DIT;
• Responds flexibly to all situations;
• “Auto-focus”: the system itself automatically adjusts so the important stuff gets done and distractions get left to one side.

Sounds impossible? Well, it’s early days yet, but I think I may have achieved it.

Watch out for more details soon!

Wholehearted Living

This article was published in my newsletter several years ago. I am re-publishing it now as it continues to be very relevant.

I can’t remember who it was — but a year or two ago someone wrote on one of the email lists to which I belong that she had learned never to say “yes” unless she could say it wholeheartedly. Whoever it was, I owe her a debt of thanks because it is one of the best lessons that I have ever learned.

The context was how easy it is for our lives to fill up with responsibilities that we have taken on more or less reluctantly. When someone asks us to do something, it is often difficult to say “no.” So we end up saying “yes” against our better judgement. And one of the reasons why it is so easy to say “yes” against our better judgement is because we often don’t have a clear and easy way to tell what our better judgement is. The other person will often come up with highly persuasive reasons which make us feel that we will be uncaring or ungrateful or illogical or mean or reckless or whatever if we don’t agree with them. And since we don’t want to feel any of these things we say “yes” reluctantly — and regret it later!

By having a clear rule that we only say “yes” when we can say it wholeheartedly we can cut through all the guilt and manipulation and find the only thing that really matters — our own knowledge of what is right for us.

I have used this method a lot over the last year and more, and found it invaluable. So for instance the other day someone rang me up and asked me if I wanted to join a local group that met every month. I really didn’t want to but had the feeling that I ought to do it and that I’d be letting the other person down if I didn’t. As I wavered on the brink of accepting (and regretting it) I suddenly found myself saying “I have a rule that I never commit myself to anything unless I can commit myself wholeheartedly, and I don’t feel I can do so with this.” To my surprise the other person, though obviously disappointed, accepted my reason like a lamb!

I have also learned to extend the principle further than the original context. Now when faced with any decision, I always ask myself “Could I do this wholeheartedly?” And if the answer is “no”, I don’t do it. Faced with a decision between two or more alternatives I ask myself “Which of these could I do wholeheartedly?” and if the answer is “neither”, I then ask myself “OK then, what could I do wholeheartedly?” and start looking for further alternatives.

Another very valuable use that I’ve found for the principle is to use it to evaluate my daily actions. So I ask myself “What could I do wholeheartedly right now?” This is very effective because I’ve discovered that it is very difficult to do anything wholeheartedly when I know I should be doing something else. So the question acts as a very good way of filtering out busy work, displacement activities and general wheel-spinning. And it greatly increases the commitment that I bring to my real work actions and the enjoyment that I get from my leisure and personal activities.

So what could I do wholeheartedly right now? Ah, yes, send this newsletter out and then go to bed!

The Best of GTD and DIT

Whakate.com have now published their comparison of David Allen’s Getting Things Done and my Do It Tomorrow.

Whakate Best of Web Award

The life-design website Whakate.com has recognised the Forum on this website as being one of the 30 best personal development and productivity resources the internet has to offer today.

See the full list of awards.

Whakate to Compare DIT and GTD

The life design website Whakate has announced that it will be carrying out a comparison between the principles of David Allen’s Getting Things Done and my Do It Tomorrow.

Whakate will explain the fundamental differences and how we can decide which one is more appropriate for the way our work is concentrated and the amount of control demanded by our lives.

The Simplest Time Management Method

What is the simplest list-based time management method?

I can remember years ago listing all my tasks as they presented themselves and then doing them in the same order that I had listed them. In other words, I was doing my tasks in strict First In, First Out (FIFO) order.

What I found of course is that I got bogged down pretty quickly. I ground gradually to a halt while the list grew longer and longer. In theory it was a great method for ensuring that everything got done. In practice, slogging through a list that only got longer and longer was mind-numbingly dull, with very little sense of achievement or completion.

Some years later I tried a similar system. This time, instead of doing the items in the order I had written them down, I did them in any order I liked. This worked much better than the first system. It felt much less like hard slog, and I found I could get a lot done very quickly.

The trouble was that that although I was getting lots of work done, it was the relatively easy work. The more difficult items tended to stay on the list for ever. I could of course try various techniques like working for a short time on a task and then re-entering it, but nevertheless working in this way resulted in a lot of easy and trivial work, and not much challenging and productive work.

I did notice one advantage though: because there was no compulsion actually to do a task, I was quite prepared to write even the most difficult task on the list.

So is there a way of running a simple list which avoids the drawbacks of these two methods, but keeps their advantages?

Yes, there is! Here’s how.

I discovered that all I had to do once I’d drawn the list up was to draw a line at the end of it. Then I continued to add new items to the end of the list but didn’t allow myself to work on them until I had finished all the items up to the line. I could do those in any order I liked.

Once I’d finished the items above the line, I drew another line at the end of the new items and did the same again.

This has some huge advantages:

1) It’s complete. Everything I write down gets done.

2) I get the advantage of the principle that procrastination is relative. The easier items act as displacement activities for the more difficult ones, so working becomes much easier. Even when I have only two difficult items left, one is still easier than the other.

3) The last item left above the line may be difficult, but the reward I get for doing it is a huge sense of completion. I have finished everything above the line, and can now draw another line. There’s a wonderful feeling of making a fresh start.

4) When I draw the line under the new items, everything above that line represents all the due work that I have at that moment. This makes it easy for me to judge whether my workload matches my capacity. If it takes longer and longer each time to clear the list, then I know that I have more work coming in than I am able to process. If the time remains reasonably stable, then I know that my workload is correct. I try to keep the time from drawing one line to drawing the next at not more than one day. Any longer than that and my response time to emails, etc., is going to be too slow.

You may have realised by now that this system is virtually identical to the core components of “Do It Tomorrow” - just that it’s not tied quite so rigidly to one day. In fact I am finding that this added element of flexibility is making the system easier to work, and I shall be incorporating this modification into the DIT seminars I run in the future.

Train-To-Gain Grants

Finance

The government Train-to-Gain organisation is willing to consider providing grants for the staff members of small-to-medium companies to attend my seminars. They must meet the following criteria:

• Between 5 and 249 employees. This applies to the whole company, not an individual site.
• Private, franchise, public and voluntary bodies (eligible employee size-band for public and voluntary bodies is 10 to 249 employees).
• Not benefited from Leadership and Management grant funding since April 2006.

To learn more visit their website at www.traintogain.gov.uk

Top Five On-Line Discussions

Congratulations everyone! We have been featured on Whakake’s Top Five Online Discussion Picks

“Mark Forster’s forums on his website and the Yahoo! Groups had many excellent topics, including how to tackle large projects and how to overcome a lack of motivation. Mark Forster gave his insight on these issues: the “Do It Tomorrow” (DIT) system gives the user complete freedom on how to tackle a large project, whether it comes down to finishing it at one sitting, working on it for a set period of time,or spending “timed bursts” of five minutes to get going. These fundamental methods to DIT (including working out daily closed lists) also help a person stay on top of work and hence stay motivated.”

Britain's Next Best Coach

I’m pleased to say that I have accepted an invitation to be one of the panel of experts for the Britain’s Next Best Coach Competition.

Read all about what is happening here.

Keep It Complicated, Stupid!

One of the reasons I like the Time Timer (see previous post) is that it is elegantly simple. It does what it does and nothing else. There are no complicated switches and menus. No one however technologically challenged could possibly have any trouble working it.

This contrasts with my digital timer which has a vast array of different settings, which even after studying the instructions at length I’m not really comfortable with.

Guess which is the better for timing intervals?

I suspect that the Time Timer took a lot of thought to make it as simple as it is - a lot more thought in fact than went into the design of the digital timer.

This reminds me of something which has always struck me about discussions on the subject of Do It Tomorrow. People always want to make it more complicated. When they hit a snag, their solution is to complicate it. So they end up with an array of lists, reminders, plans and priorities which sound as if they will take more time to work than the work itself.

This is actually going in the wrong direction. Do It Tomorrow is a very simple system. All you need to work it is a page-a-day diary and a pen. There’s no need to plan your day, because the system produces your next day’s work automatically. And it provides a simple, easy way of checking that your work is in balance with your time.

When any system gets more and more complicated this is almost always a sign that a “work-around” is in progress. What this means is that it’s easier to work around a problem than to look at why that problem is happening in the first place. For instance if someone is being lazy about how they focus their work, then it is easier to introduce a new layer of complexity than to ask the searching questions that need to be asked.

Anyway, how could I improve the Time Timer? Well, I think it would be good to have it count-up as well as count-down, so we could just add a little button here, and it would be good to have a digital display as well - that would be easy if we made the main dial smaller. And if we’re making the main dial smaller, why not have two dials so we can time two things at once…?