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The KonMari method of Project and Goal Review

“Allow me to be the first person you’ve met who enjoys doing laundry…”

How to Run an Empire

Le 15 mai 1796, le général Bonaparte fit son entrée dans Milan à la tête de cette jeune armée qui venait de passer le pont de Lodi, et d’apprendre au monde qu’après tant de siècles César et Alexandre avaient un successeur. (Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme)

As you may have read in my posts about my book challenge, I have been reading about Napoleon Bonapart for some weeks now.

Whatever your views about the vast numbers of dead soldiers and civilians his wars left across Europe (and some other parts of the world as well) he was one of the most dynamic people who ever lived. His empire may have been transitory, but it still lives on in a myriad of ways -  law, arts, institutions, systems of government, to name a few.

There were two not-so-obvious things that struck me about him. One was how his “team” was able to show considerable personal initiative while still adhering to his overall direction. Not only that, they were remarkably stable and loyal to him personally over the years of the French Empire. The second thing that struck me was the extent to which Napoleon micro-managed his empire. This reminded me of how Philip II, a man of considerably less talent than Napoleon, micro-managed the enormous Spanish Empire.

These two things - the team loyalty and the micro-management - depended on the same thing. That was Napoleon’s enormous correspondence.

The most comprehensive collection of his letters contains 33,000 items of correspondence, and there must be many others that have not survived. They were send by post, carried by courier and transmitted by telegraph. The highest prince and the most lowly official might find their work the subject of an imperial enquiry. No subject was too small for his attention.

What was the effect of all this correspondence?

It’s an example in action of my frequently repeated dictum that a project will grow provided that it is given sufficient regular focused attention. Napoleon did this on the grandest scale.

What sort of effect did it have on the recipients?

1) It showed that the Emperor was interested in them personally and that their work was important to him.

2) It kept them on their toes and stopped them from coasting.

3) They would learn from the fact that their work was being assessed by one of the sharpest minds that has ever existed.

4) It imposed a uniformity of standards and procedures over the whole massive Empire.

5) It encouraged them in rapidity of thought and action.

5) Much of the corrrespondence was in response to their own reports. So these were very much two-way exchanges.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of course.

What are the lessons for us? Basically that we need to keep communicating. Not in the sort of gigantic reports copied to everyone as a back-covering exercise - which succeed in nothing except bringing individuals’ work to a standstill. But in communications to individuals which are short and to the point. The amount of time Napoleon devoted to this - even on the eve of battle - shows the immense importance he gave it.

Just as a minor example of this, if you are a follower of the forums on this website you may have noticed that when I play a full part on the forums there are many posts each day. For instance yesterday there were 23 comments, of which six were by me. If I take a break from posting, the number of posts falls off until days pass without any. I’m not trying to compare myself to Napoleon - just make the point that if you want to get closer to people then you need to increase your rate of communication. Keep your correspondence with people alive and the relationships will blossom. Though please note that I am talking about appropriate communication here - I’m not trying to turn you all into stalkers!

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Willpower and Time Management - I

“Consistent action to follow one’s long-term goals can only be carried out by constructing a scenario in which it’s easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing…”

Willpower and Time Management - II

Yesterday in Paying the Price I said that we can only claim that we really want something if we are prepared to pay the price. This applies whether we want to play a musical instrument, get fit, set up our own business, write a book or even just have a tidy office.

This is closely related to what I said In Willpower and Time Management - I :

“Consistent action to follow one’s long-term goals can only be carried out by constructing a scenario in which it’s easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing.”

In the past I’ve frequently used the analogy of a river and a swamp. In both cases water is just doing what water does, and the difference lies in the surrounding circumstances.

In the same way humans just do what humans do. The difference between success and failure in a productive goal is all in the surroundings.

My contention is that no-list systems are better than catch-all systems at providing the surroundings needed for success.

Why?

The reason is because a catch-all system is based on a long list of everything that you have to do. Since the list may be fifty to a hundred items (or more) long it is obviously impossible for it all to be done immediately. So it becomes a list of things over which you are delaying action.

The process you are building into your brain with a catch-all list is therefore:

1. Decide to do
2. Put on List
3. Delay action

A no-list system on the other hand  is about immediate action. A no-list system will typically be dealing with five or less tasks at a time.

Therefore the process you are building into your brain with a no-list system is:

1. Decide to do
2. Put on list
3. Take action

You have the impulse to do something, and almost immediately you take action on that impulse. The act of writing it down prevents you from merely drifting. Writing it focuses the mind and ensures that you are taking action purposefully.

The very fact that you have started to take action begins to lay down patterns of action in your brain.

Perhaps the most important pattern is that when you write something on your list you take action on it. Action becomes the natural consequence of writing something down. And writing something down is the natural consequence of deciding to do it.

Another almost equally important pattern is that once you’ve written something down and have started to take action you tend to continue in that action in the future. Every time you continue to take action you reinforce the new pattern.

A third important pattern is that having written actions down in a certain order you have begun to lay this down as a pattern for action in the future.

What has happened is that you have initiated action, reinforced action and laid down a sequence of action. You have in other words constructed the circumstances which will lead you to sticking with the goal.

My Book Challenge - Update

It’s taken longer than I expected but I have now finished Part 2 of Napoleon the Great by Andrew Roberts. Before starting the third and final part, I will aim to read some shorter books, starting with The Military Philosophers by Anthony Powell.

I’ve so far stuck to my rule to read only one book at a time, and have finished the following since January 24th:

The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley.

The Valley of Bones by Anthony Powell

Napoleon the Great (parts 1 and 2) by Andrew Roberts

In Parenthesis by David Jones

The Soldier’s Art by Anthony Powell

Paying the Price

In a recent post I said:

I’ve always wanted to learn lots of poems by heart.

No, I’ll rephrase that - I’ve always wanted to have learned lots of poems by heart.

There’s a story which I’ve told before about the famous pianist Artur Rubinstein. After one of his brilliant performances a society lady came up to him and gushed, “Mr Rubinstein, I’d give anything to be able to play like you.” Rubinstein looked at her and said “No, you wouldn’t.”

What he meant was that the price she would need to pay was hours and hours of practice, day after day, for year after year, decade after decade. And there was no more chance of her being willing to pay that price than fly to the moon.

What she really wanted of course was to be able to play like Rubinstein without having to pay the price.

The story is similar to that told about one of Napoleon’s marshals, Lefebvre. To quote Wikipedia:

When a friend expressed envy of his estate, Lefebvre said “Come down in the courtyard, and I’ll have ten shots at you with a musket at 30 paces. If I miss, the whole estate is yours.”

The friend refused. He was envious of the estate, but not of the years of fighting and danger which Lefebvre had lived through in order to win it.

I’m sure we all have things we would like to be or to have done. But are we willing to pay the price?

If you are not willing to put the price for what you want, then you don’t really want it at all. Not that much anyway.

Two Interesting Articles

Rita Coelho do Vale is an assistant professor at the Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics, where she researches the human decision-making process with respect to self-regulation. She says that we not only can but should engage in behaviour antithetical to our ultimate goals.

https://aeon.co/essays/a-lapse-now-and-then-can-benefit-the-pursuit-of-excellence

… research suggests there’s a simple way to make healthy behaviors easier. It’s not about trying to increase your motivation so much as taking advantage of motivation when you do have it. That’s according to BJ Fogg, a psychologist and director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/bj-fogg-how-to-stick-with-habits-2016-3

Testing the New System - Update

Although the latest version of the new system worked splendidly over most of last week, it was beginning to falter by Friday. What I really mean of course is that I was beginning to falter. I can’t blame it all on the system!

It may be that I was just ignoring my own advice, repeated many times over the years, that there will come a time with every system when you get heartily sick of it. The remedy is to stop hammering away at it and instead take a short break.

But I think that at least part of the problem is that I haven’t yet quite achieved the right balance in the system. By balance I mean that the system must both process the easy routine tasks (which are often easy precisely because they are routine) with the new more challenging tasks that haven’t yet been made into routines (and in some cases never will be).

When the balance goes wrong, both of these are impacted adversly. For example my established routine for exercise collapsed as did my not-as-yet-routined plans for marketing a local association.

Today I’ve been picking up the pieces. I’ve made a few adjustments to the way the system works and will continue testing. But I think I won’t tempt fate by making it public again for a while yet!

Willpower and Time Management - I

On Friday I re-blogged Daniel Reeves article Ego Depletion Depletion from the Beeminder blog

My view about willpower has always been that it is a struggle between one’s short-term and long-term wishes, and that all else being equal the short-term wishes will win out. One can put up a struggle against this for a while but sooner or later (usually sooner) the struggle will be too much for us.

Consistent action to follow one’s long-term goals can only be carried out by constructing a scenario in which it’s easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing.

My contention is that no-list systems are better at doing this than catch-all systems. Over the next few days I want to explore the reasons why this is so.

Most Popular Articles This Week

1. First Day of Testing
2. How to Sort Out a Room and Keep It Sorted
3. Overcommitment and the Catch-All List

Calling Your Future Self to Account

One of the tools we have at our disposal to support our efforts in productivity is the sending of messages to our future selves. These messages can often be very effective.

There’s a variety of ways in which this can be done. The easiest way for most of us is by email. You can use apps like Evernote or Outlook to to send you an email on any date you specify. Or you can get websites like FutureMe to do the same. The advantage of using an external website is that you won’t be tempted to cheat by looking up what you wrote, and it’s much more likely that you’ll entirely forget that you sent yourself a message so it comes as a surprise. Hopefully a pleasant one!

What sort of messages can you send to yourself? The only limit is your imagination, but here are a few suggestions.

You might want to jolly yourself along on a long-term project. In which case you could send yourself a series of emails on different dates:

What have you done about x this week?

What have you done about x this month?

What have you done about x this quarter?

What have you done about x this year?

or check that you are still making progress:

Are you still keeping to your diet?

How many pounds have you lost?

Are you still learning Chinese? If not, why not?

How much money have you given to charity?

Have you done anything about your idea for a sponsored run?

Or you might give yourself a prize:

Do you remember you said you would buy yourself a new camera if you lost 20 lbs this year?

Other uses might be to remind yourself of your new year resolutions a month down the line, or reminders of action such as buying your significant other’s birthday present. You could even send yourself study notes, poems, or vocabulary lists for revision.

My experience of sending myself a future message like this is that even after quite a short period I forget that I’ve sent it - which greatly increases its effect when it arrives. This of course diminishes if you send yourself too many - so don’t deluge yourself with messages - you don’t want to become your own backseat driver. Keep them as an occasional weapon for maximum effect.

If you’ve got any ideas for other ways this idea could be used, let us know in the comments.

Ego Depletion Depletion

This article by Daniel Reeves is re-blogged from The Beeminder Blog with his permission as I believe it has considerable implications for time management.

The big news in psychology this week is that Baumeister’s Ego Depletion model is bunk. At least it has failed to replicate.

I’m trying not to gloat too much but I’ve been pooh-poohing Ego Depletion for years. My take has been, based on the theory of hyperbolic discounting, that willpower is an illusion — a manifestation of the conflict between desires at different timescales. Which is why commitment devices, by changing your incentives, route around the problem entirely. Hooray Beeminder and friends! And hooray for economist Robert Strotz and psychologist George Ainslie who figured this all out between 1955 and 1975 or so.

Actually I really can’t gloat too much because I was far from the first to balk at Baumeister’s model. In fact, it wasn’t until Carol Dweck’s challenge that I publicly expressed my skepticism. Then Nick Winter wrote a book, The Motivation Hacker, the thesis of which is basically that willpower is an unlimited resource.

More recently, Slate Star Codex reviewed Baumeister’s book, which is surprisingly light on Ego Depletion theory, other than to take it as a background fact. Slate Star Codex expressed skepticism, and even pointed out another replication failure for Ego Depletion from 2014, but did agree with the premise that mental willpower is depletable like physical willpower is. With the right inducement you may be able to eke out another mile of running or another hour of studying but in both cases the fatigue is real.

My counterargument is that with physical endurance you approach a physical limit asymptotically. The feeling that you can always eke out more with the right inducement is an illusion. Eventually one more straw will in fact break a camel’s back. With mental willpower it’s different. With the right inducement (say, continued employment) you can exert superhuman willpower, like waking up early and going to work every day for years or decades. Which is to say that with the right incentives, willpower doesn’t even need to be invoked. You can route around it and find creative ways to induce yourself to do what you really want to do.

Since I’ve now segued elegantly back to Beeminder, the best way to use such a commitment device, at least initially, is not to probe the hard limits of willpower but to fix egregious instances of akrasia — to do a bit more than the bupkes you’d do if left to your own devices. You can then gradually dial up the steepness of your graph, but stop before feeling overwhelmed by stress and anxiety.

In other words, make a measurable improvement well below the point that the limits of willpower are even a question (if you don’t think of it as routing around willpower altogether). Some people — like the productivity-ueber-alles types who try polyphasic sleep and whatnot — thrive on adding stress and Beeminder can accommodate that. But using it in moderation can reduce stress and that depleted ego feeling, like by getting you to spread your studying out over a semester instead of cramming for exams, or by making you pay attention to your Fitbit just enough to get in 10k steps a day, or getting yourself to bed on time instead of staying up until 6am writing a blog post.

PS: Discussion of Ego Depletion’s current replication crisis, along with practical implications, is ongoing in the Beeminder forum.

No Blog Post Today

Taking a day off from blogging. Back tomorrow.

Memorizing Poetry and Prose

I’ve always wanted to learn lots of poems by heart.

No, I’ll rephrase that - I’ve always wanted to have learned lots of poems by heart.

The problem is that I do not find memorizing easy even though I’m old enough to have had to learn poetry by heart at school, all of which I’ve forgotten except for a few scattered lines.

However I have made quite a few attempts over the years with the result that I know the opening lines, and the opening lines only, of a large but rather weird selection of poems and books.

Let’s see what I can remember:

Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
Che la dirrita via era smarrita
Ahi! Quant’…. um er

Tel qu’en lui-meme enfin l’eternite le change
Le poete suscite avec son glaive nu… er um

Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree
Whose taste brough death into the world and all our woe
Sing heavenly Muse who on the ? of Oreb or of Zion
Didst first instruct…

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth and the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the abyss. (…) the spirit of God moved upon the waters (?). And God said Let there be light and there was light. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

I can do a lot more like that. Pretty impressive, eh? Anyone able to recognise the mangled remains of these great passages?**

What’s the reason for this abysmal performance? Well partly of course it’s that learning by heart takes effort and application, and also constant revision and renewal. But it’s also that I’ve never really found a satisfactory method. As soon as the words seem to be in my head, they start flowing out again. The idea of learning a long poem like “Paradise Lost” is demotivating not just because of the immense effort involved but because I’m quite sure that by the time I’d reached the end I’d long ago have forgotten the beginning.

Yet our ancestors don’t seem to have had too much problem with memorizing. The Iliad and the Odyssey are supposed to have been transmitted orally. The Vedic Sutras have been transmitted orally for thousands of years so accurately there are no variant readings. To be a bishop in the ancient church, you had to know all the psalms off by heart (it takes over five hours to recite them), Sir Winston Churchill recounted in My Early Life that his father had committed to memory long passages of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  And a more recent (fictional) example of our failing ability to remember, in the wedding with which The Godfather opens - which is set in 1945 - everyone knows the words of the Italian songs. In the Godfather Part III - which is set in the late 70s - everyone stumbles over the words.

My own personal reason for not having learned any poems successfully since my schooldays is that I have never found a satisfactory method for doing it. I’ve tried all the methods that a Google search will reveal, without much success with any of them.

But just recently I’ve found a method which seems to work better. I’d be interested to know if it works for anyone else.

The Method:

1. Take one chunk of the passage at a time. A verse, short paragraph or long sentence is about right.

2. Read it to yourself over and over trying each time to say as much as you can from memory

3. Keep doing this until you can repeat the whole chunk at least once from memory

4. Then revise the chunk to yourself at intervals without referring to the book

5. Say as much as you can as accurately as you can, but don’t refer to the book. Force your mind to reconstruct the passage as far as it can without prompting.

6. Do this several times, and then refer back to the passage. Repeat 4 to 6 until you’ve got it pat. Then move on to the next chunk.

The key to this is in the forcing yourself to remember rather than giving your mind an easy crutch.

** The opening lines of 1) Dante’s Divine Comedy 2) Mallarmé’s Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe 3) Milton’s Paradise Lost 4) The Book of Genesis (King James version).

Second Day's Summary

Looking back at the list of tasks which I did today, let’s see what lessons can be drawn from it.

First of all, you can get a certain amount of information just by looking at the list, without even reading the individual tasks. You can see immediately from the times in bold what my level of activity was as the day progressed. This will vary from person to person, but as for me I started the day with a huge burst of activity which lasted most of the morning in which all the routine minor tasks were cleared.  This lasted until I went to the gym. After that I had a slow afternoon, and then picked up again in the evening when my work took on a completely different characteristic.

Note that this information would be difficult to get if I hadn’t put the times in. And it would be still be difficult to follow if each task had its own time. But with the hourly times in bold you can take in at a glance how much activity there was during that hour. A more detailed look will then tell you what sort of activity the hour was made of.

You can also see very clearly how much repetition of tasks there was.

On the whole I did everything I wanted to do. I was particularly pleased to have gone to the gym, to have kept all the zero in-boxes at zero, to have done some good work on my new book draft, and to have kept the list posted throughout the day. The only thing missing from today which I was working on yesterday is the draft for the local association’s marketing plan. But I’ve got over a month to get that finalized, so there is no particular urgency about it.

Since keeping a live list on-line is a considerable burden, I don’t intend to do it any of the other days of this test. But I will keep you posted about how it’s going. I’m looking forward to working tomorrow without that hanging round my neck!

Today's Tasks (live)

As part of today’s testing of my new time management system I am going to write down each task as I do it. The qualification to be on this list is that it has been entered in the system. That means that the tasks may be anything from the completely inconsequential to being of the utmost significance and anything in between - just so long as they have been entered into the system. That also means that there will be other tasks I have done which I haven’t used the systems for, so it won’t reflect everything that I do during the day.

Where I have done the same task more than once during the day I will put a number in brackets after the task. So “Email (3)” means the third time I have done the task “Email” today. Where there is no number it means the task has only been done once.

Please bear in mind that maintaining this list in real time throughout the day is a considerable overhead and slows down my speed of action.

For the interests of clarity and privacy a few of the tasks may be rephrased when I put them on this post.

Here goes:

(8.10 am)
Take pill
Make tea (1)
Computer Housekeeping (1)
Wash Up
Blog
Computer Housekeeping (2)
Tidy
Charge Camera Battery
Email (1)
Evernote (1)
Adjust Clock
Evernote (2)
Read blogs
Facebook
Email (2)
Computer Housekeeping (3)
(9 am)
BrainHQ (1)
Comments (1)
Wash Up (2)
(10 am)
Sharpen Knives
Sort Office Drawer (1)
Check Diary
Questioning: Blog Subjects?
Draft Tomorrow’s Blog Post (1)
Computer Housekeeping (4)
Paper Inbox
Sort Office Drawer (2)
Text L re D
One-Line-A-Day (1)
(11 am)
Wish S Happy Birthday
Make Tea (2)
Draft Tomorrow’s Blog Post (2)
Sort Office Drawer (3)
(12 Noon)
Prepare Gym
Go to Gym
(2 pm)
Lunch
(3 pm)
BrainHQ (2)
Comments (2)
Sort Office Drawer (3)
Change Clothes
(4 pm)
Put out Wheelie Bin
Wash Up (3)
Post Letters
Check TrueCall
Phone G re Cheque (1)
Make Tea (3)
(5 pm)
Email (3)
Upgrade Software
Draft Today’s Summary
Phone G re Cheque (2)
Wash Up (4)
(6 pm)
Facebook (2)
Sort Office Drawer (4)
“Napoleon the Great”
(7 pm)
Book Draft
Wash Up (5)
Comments (3)
One Line A Day (2)
Watch Truffaut’s Domicile Conjugal
(8 pm)
Shred Old Vouchers
“Napoleon the Great”

 That’s enough for today!

Second Day of Testing

How did it go yesterday?

I started off by returning everything (email, paper, etc) back to zero. This isn’t necessarily the best way to start the day - especially if you are not confident of getting to the important stuff. But it does give you a sense of being on top - which, as I often say, is a good way of energizing yourself.

The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed that I cheated. In spite of the fact that this is supposed to be a test of a no-list system, I did have a list of things to do - namely the list of intended tasks on yesterday’s blog post. Of course this is not really cheating at all. A statement of intention for the day is an extremely useful device - provided it doesn’t become a catch-all list. In fact the shorter it is the better - just the two or three main things you want to accomplish is sufficient. Don’t include any of the routine stuff which you would (or should) do anyway, and absolutely nothing of stuff you may or may not every get round to doing. My list yesterday was longer than the ideal - but that was for the benefit of you the readers. I was however conscious that the list was influencing what I was doing in a way I wasn’t entirely happy with.

And today?

Again I’m lucky in having no appointments today. In fact the same is true of most of the week ahead (how did that happen? - it’s most unusual)

And tomorrow?

I have a lecture to attend which will take up the second half of the morning. Apart from that, nothing. Another chance to get a fair amount of work done.

Things I want to achieve today:

I’m not going to produce a pre-action list of any kind today. I’ll just do whatever comes into my head in genuine no-list fashion. But so you can see what I’m up to, I’ll publish a post-action list as I go along. I’ll do it on a separate post though so it’s easier to follow. I think this will give a clearer picture of what the system is like in action. Though please bear in mind that reporting what I’ve done as I do it is quite a heavy load in itself and slows the system down to a measurable extent.

First Day of Testing

My playing around with the latest version of my new time management system seems to have worked out ok, so I’m going to make another attempt to test it out for one week, starting today.

Last time I listed what I wanted to achieve during the course of the week, but this time I plan to list each day what I want to achieve during that day.

So this is what I want for today:

Tomorrow’s blog post  [completed]

Walk of at least 3 miles [3.26 miles cross-country in 49 mins @ 4 mph]

Issue my newsletter [Completed, scheduled for sending 11.01 a.m. 14 March]

Second draft of Marketing Plan for local association [continuing]

Keep up to date with all routine tasks, e.g. email, website comments, voicemail, paper, facebook, etc [evernote, take blood pressure, wind clock, dishes, clean muddy boots, finance] [all completed]

Watch Truffaut’s Les Quatre cents coups [completed]

Sort bureau drawer [continuing]

Dispose of outdated business vouchers, statements, etc. [continuing]

Work on outline of new book [continuing]

Business plan [continuing]

Read unspecified amount of Napoleon the Great [26 pages]

I’ve no appointments today so I should be able to a good shot at these.

I’ll try to cross them out in real time, so if anyone wants to see how I’m getting on they can check the web page during the day.

How to sort out a room - and keep it sorted

If your entire house, office and work space are clean, tidy and with everything sorted and in its place, then you can ignore this article.

For the rest of us, here’s how to do it. The principles here can be applied to any room or space, but for the sake of illustration I will use a home office - mainly because I am typing this while sitting in a beautifully clean, tidy and sorted office - which didn’t always use to be that way.

And no doubt you can apply it to other life situations as well, such as sorting out your commitments, your finances, and so on and so forth. But I’ll leave all that up to your imagination.

When sorting a room the ideal is to sort it so you don’t have to spend an entire weekend on it but can do it over a longer period bit by bit without disrupting your work.

Here goes:

Step 1. Start a recurring task “Sort Office”.

Step 2. List every visible part of the office.

We start with the visible parts because it’s highly motivating to have an office that looks tidy and efficient, even if it hides a multitude of horrors behind the drawers and cupboard doors. If you start with the invisible parts, you are going to have to work in a place that look untidy and inefficient for quite a while yet.

As I was saying, list every visible part of the office. That means every piece of furniture, every window sill and other surface, and the floor. Divide the floor up into about six to eight portions, depending on the size of the room.

Number every item on the list, with the floor portions last.

Step 3. Take the first item on the list and sort its exterior thoroughly. Get it exactly the way you want it to look.

Step 4. Start a recurring task “Tidy Office”

This task is used to keep the parts that you have finished sorting in a sorted condition. Do not use it on parts that haven’t been sorted yet.

Step 5. Repeat Step 3 for each part of the office which you have listed.

Step 6. Once you have completed sorting the visible parts of your office, make another list of all the invisible parts. This will include all drawers, filing cabinets, cupboards, etc. Take each item on the list in turn and sort it thoroughly. The easiest way to do this is to tip all the contents onto the floor and sort them there.

There you have it. A complete sort of everything in your office with a recurring task “Tidy Office” to keep it that way.

Most Popular Forum Topic This Week

Why was Superfocus version 3 abandoned again?

…SFv3 has all the flow of AF1 but with these enhancements: (1) the ability to handle urgent tasks efficiently, and (2) a greater emphasis on “little and often”. Heck, you can even add a “Do this first thing in the morning” task: rewrite your most important task into your current page’s Column 2 before you sleep…