Donations Button

The eagle-eyed among you will already have noticed that I’ve recently resurrected the donations button in the right-hand margin. It’s there in case you are so immeasurably grateful for the vast amount of free material on this website that you want to express your gratitude in a concrete way.

London Bridgathon a Great Success

9 Days to go - Support us for the London Bridgathon!

With just nine days to go before the London Bridgathon, we have so far succeeded in raising £2,000 (approx $3,084), which is way beyond our target of £1,500. And with Gift Aid Tax rebate it will be worth £2,222.50 (approx $3,428).

Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far for your generosity. Unfortunately I can’t write to thank you individually because I’m not notified of your email addresses.

Great success though it is, I’m sure we can still get way beyond it. If you haven’t already supported us (or even if you have), please help us to at least double our original target - another £1,000 ($1,542). It’s for the best of causes, the saving of human life (maybe yours!) not just in the United Kingdom but, through the expertise of UCLH, throughout the world.

London Bridgathon Progress Report

Just to let you know that with 47 days still to go we have already raised £810 (£891 with UK tax rebate) for the Bridgathon.

Many thanks to everyone who is supporting us - it’s a wonderful effort so far. But we still need more than £600 to meet our target, which I’m hoping we’ll go zooming past.

So plenty of scope for more people to give - we depend on you!

A Message from Mark's Daughter Anna

Most of you don’t know that my dad was diagnosed last year with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Thankfully, the treatment he received at the Leukaemia & Lymphoma unit at University College London Hospital saved his life - a world turned upside down is once again right side up. On 20th Sept I’m doing a sponsored walk across six London bridges with my dad, to raise money for the unit so patients can benefit from the research, treatment and services offered by UCLH and have the best shot of survival. I can’t thank them enough for what they did for my dad, but the least I can do is walk over a bridge or two (or six). If you can, please sponsor us. It’s for a really worthy cause.

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/team/marks_team

(To support us by sponsoring this event use this link, not the Donate button in the margin).

Update on Monday, July 27, 2015 at 11:22 by Mark Forster

We’ve had a fantastic response so far with over £500 being pledged - many thanks to everyone for their generosity. Still plenty of time to go before September 20th!

[I’ve temporarily removed the Donate button in the right margin to prevent people from mistakenly using it to donate to this Appeal. Anyone who has done so can rest assured that I will pass the money on to the Appeal with no need for further action from themselves. - Mark]

A New Method of Learning [Experimental]

I don’t know how many of my readers have used Spaced Repetition System (SRS) software to learn facts. They are most commonly used for foreign language vocabulary, but can be used for any type of fact that you wish to learn.

Personally I have always found them to be quite effective, but they suffer from some severe negatives which in the end have always lead me to abandon them after a period. Because they put the emphasis on the facts which you are having difficulty learning, you tend to end up with a huge number of difficult words which you have to plough through each day. The list tends to get longer and longer until, if you are not careful, you find yourself ploughing through vocabularly at almost every spare waking moment.

That’s frankly not the way I want to spend my life.

So how about a gentler and easier method which is even more effective?

You will probably think the method I’m going to propose is crazy, but I’m finding it has worked very well so far. I haven’t been doing it for very long, but I’d be interested in the results that other people get if they are bold enough to try it out too on an experimental basis.

Like all my systems I’ve designed it for paper and pen. I suggest if you want to try it that you use paper and pen at first, and then only if you find it works start worrying about how to make an electronic version.

For the purposes of the explanation I am assuming that you are an English speaker wanting to learn French vocabulary.

The system is based on spaced repetition, but with the difference that all the vocabulary items are revised at each interval.

The intervals are:

On the day of entry

The following day

One week later

One month later

One year later

I use a loose-leaf binder with a sheet for each day’s vocabulary. All I have to do when I’ve finished revising is put the date of the next revision at the top of the sheet and re-file it so all the sheets are in date order.

THE PROCEDURE

The First Day

On today’s sheet collect vocabulary as you come across it in the traditional two-column format. That is to say, French in the left-hand column and English in the right-hand column. Make no attempt to learn it until you have finished collecting it for the day.

Then you go through two phases: 1) pre-learning 2) learning.

Phase 1. Pre-learning

Cover up the right-hand column (the English) and test yourself on the meaning of the French words in the left-hand column. DO NOT CHECK YOUR ANSWERS. If you can’t get any answer, just go on to the next word. Then cover up the left-hand column and test yourself whether you know the French for the English words in the right-hand column. DO NOT CHECK YOUR ANSWERS.

Phase 2. Learning

Do exactly the same, but this time move the covering card down after attempting to answer each question so you can see whether you got it right. Do it both ways as in Phase 1. That’s all. You only do it once. Don’t repeat it, regardless of how many you got wrong.

This Phase 2 on the first day is the only time in the entire process that you check your answers.

Subsequent Revisions

These are all carried out in the same way as Phase 1 on the first day. In other words you test yourself without checking the answers.

CONCLUSION

Although the process may sound crazy, it is in accordance with the most recent findings on how we learn. A pre-learning test increases learning ability. Not checking one’s answers makes the brain work harder so that it remembers better on subsequent tests.

Dotting Power

In the FV/FVP Forum there has been quite a lot of discussion about the selection of tasks (which is done by putting a dot before the task).

I want to write a little bit about how to control this selection to one’s best advantage.

First of all the good news is that the process is controllable. In fact it’s possible to exercise quite a considerable degree of control without prejudicing the principle that selection should be done by intuition rather than consciously.

For instance, take the question of how you can ensure that the early tasks on your list get actioned. This can be done very easily by instructing your mind to select no tasks at all, except really urgent ones. This will take you back quite quickly to the first task on the list. How do you instruct your mind to do this? In the same way that you instruct your body to walk faster, walk slower or stand still. You just do it!

You can then instruct your mind to give preference to earlier tasks and lay off selecting recently entered tasks. That will keep you working in the early part of the list, but without having to stick rigidly to a pre-selected order. You instruct your mind in the same way you’d instruct your body to walk fast for a short time and then slow down. You can leave the mechanics of doing that to your body to sort out!

Or if you instead want to clear recently arrived minor tasks, instruct your mind to keep selecting tasks towards the end of the list.  The point is that you have a large degree of control over which part of the list you are going to be working in.

You can even fine tune it so that you are paying attention to both ends of the list, but not the the middle. Why would you want to do that? Well, take a situation in which you are clearing some old tasks, but some of them need several sessions to get them cleared.

One the whole though, I prefer most of the time to allow my mind to select whatever it wants without any special instructions. But I know I can take more control as and when I need to.

A few things to watch:

1. The more dots you put on the list, the more inflexible the list becomes. Just instruct your mind to select less dots rather than more. You can fine-tune this until you get the list at the right balance between flexibility and direction.
2. Keep the list well-weeded. It’s a good idea to have a task on the list called “Weed List”. Be ruthless!
3. Don’t forget “little and often”. The list is very good at multiple sessions on tasks. You just keep re-entering them at the end of the list.
4. If you need to do tasks in a certain order (i.e. you need to do x before you can do y), remember that dotted tasks are done in the reverse order to list order. So if they are already in reverse order you can dot both tasks, but if they are in the right order on the list then only dot the one you want to do first, and you can then pick up the second one on the next scan.
5.  If you have an urgent task, just write it at the end of the list. It will be picked up on the next scan (i.e. when you’ve finished the task you are working on at the moment) and will then be the next task to do.
6. If you know that you don’t want the next scan to select anything, then skip the scan altogether - or just skim it to make sure.
7. Try and avoid special markings, groupings, tags and similar devices. They all add to the administrative load of running the list.

And finally use pen/pencil and paper unless you are completely addicted to electronic means. It’s far faster and you are not dependent on energy supplies, connectivity or having enough money to pay the bills. It’s also better for the planet!

Follow Up to the Productive Day Challenge

The purpose of yesterday’s Productive Day Challenge was not to show how superior I am to other people. I am naturally disorganised, lazy and procrastinating - and I have no godlike powers of any sort. Far from it.

The purpose was to show how much one person can achieve in a day using a powerful time management system. And the message is that anyone can do the same if they use exactly the same methods as I did. You can easily verify it for yourself by writing out a similar list and putting the methods to work. But you do need to use exactly the same methods. I’m not claiming that the methods I used are the only methods that can achieve the same sort of results, but what I am saying is that if you use any variation whatsoever on what I did then you are not using the methods I used to achieve the results.

Apart from a couple of items, everything I wanted to achieve during the day was already on my normal everyday list, which has about 60-70 tasks on it. I worked off this list in the normal way. So I did not make any special preparations for the Productive Day, nor did I work in any way different from a normal day.

During the day I did not feel any resistance or sense of pressure. I just carried on working the system according to the rules. When I wrote the definition of what would make me consider the day to have been productive, I had a pretty good idea already of how much I could do in a day. So I had no real doubts that I could get everything on the list done. At the end of the day I didn’t feel tired or exhausted. I felt just the same as I feel at the end of a normal day. In fact this was a normal day.

Things I didn’t do

I didn’t bother to ask the question mentioned in the rules. Experience is showing that it’s quicker and just as effective to select the tasks without asking the question. Just go for what feels ready to be done.

I did not use electronic means. Paper and pen is faster and has less administrative overload.

I did not use any special markings or groupings. These all add to the administrative overload - better off without them.

I didn’t worry about finishing. I knew that the list was within my capability, so I just relaxed and got on with it.

I didn’t let “inbox zero” slip. Building up backlogs is the best way of bogging yourself down. I emptied all “inbox” tasks (email, Evernote, paper, comments, and doing the dishes) multiple times during the day.

I didn’t try to mark up (“dot”) too many tasks at once. The fewer the dots the more flexible the list.

I didn’t confine myself to what was on the Productive Day list. I actually did quite a lot of other tasks as well. I also exceeded my target amount for several tasks which were part of the Productive Day.

The Productive Day Challenge

What I am going to do is define what I would need to have done in order to consider tomorrow (Monday) to be a productive day. I will be using FVP as my time management system.

I am going to use my list as it is - which has most of the tasks on it already. I’m not going to cheat by moving them all to the end of the list.

I’ll report back on how many of the tasks I succeed in doing.

So here goes - I would consider tomorrow to be a productive day if:

I have zero inbox at the end of the day in

Email
Paper
Evernote Inbox
Doing the dishes

I have walked at least four miles [5.17 miles]
I have done 100 press ups
I have done The Plank exercise for at least 90 seconds [110 seconds - ai yai yai!]
I have sold our unused car for scrap [got £60!]
I have, as Press Officer, edited the photos for yesterday’s Croquet Tournament, Friday’s Golf Tournament and last week’s Golf Club Dinner.
I have done at least one day’s Glossika French lesson [2 days’ Lessons]
I have listened to at least one chapter of Genesis and St Matthew’s Gospel in the original languages [2 chapters Genesis, 1 Exodus, 2 St Matthew]
I have sorted out my regular donation to the Bursary Fund
I have invited L to take part in September’s Charity walk
I have checked whether R has decided to take part in the walk.
I have emailed an update to those who have already agreed to take part in the above Charity Walk
I have said the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary
I have telephoned my dentist re work needed
I have read at least something in the Qu’ran and the Hadith
I have notified my bank about my forthcoming trip
I’ve written a second draft of my paper for the Finance Committee about Running a Legacy Campaign
I sorted out a new contract for my smart phone
I’ve sent details of my expenses to my financial adviser
I have revised my plan as Press Officer
I have revised my plan for publicity for my new book

And I nearly forgot…
I have kept up to date with the comments on my website [17 replies written today]

Update on Monday, June 8, 2015 at 23:33 by Mark Forster

Finished! Time for a glass of Poit Dhubh to celebrate.

I’ll post a follow-up tomorrow sometime.

A Few More FVP Stats

Here are a few more stats in addition to my last post.

After one week of FVP ending on Saturday evening:

Saturday: 95 tasks entered, 44 remaining

Friday: 93 tasks entered, 13 remaining

Thursday: 74 tasks entered, 5 remaining

Sunday-Wednesday: 341 tasks entered, 10 remaining.

FVP Statistics Updated

After one week using the FVP method, how have I done?

Total number of tasks entered: 603

Total number of tasks completed: 531

Total number of tasks remaining: 72

The first 149 tasks have all been actioned.

Work done yesterday (Friday):

No. of tasks entered during day: 91

No. of those tasks actioned during day: 52

No. of those tasks unactioned at close of day: 39

No. of tasks actioned from previous days: 37

Total tasks actioned during day: 89

Note that the number of tasks currently remaining on the list (72) is less than the number of tasks I succeeded in doing yesterday (89).

FVP Statistics

I started my present FVP list during the evening of 30 May, a bit short of a week ago. So I thought it would be a good idea to show how my list has developed - particularly in view of some concerns which have been voiced about whether difficult tasks would ever get done using the algorithm.

I’ve used the same algorithm all the time I’ve been working this list. I have however varied the question. I started with “What is more exciting than x?” and then changed it to a questionless sort in which tasks were dotted according to whether they “stood out” or not. Currently I think this questionless sort is superior to using a question.

Anyway, here are the statistics:

Total number of tasks entered: 441

Total number of tasks completed: 376

Total number of tasks remaining: 65

I am using a notebook with 31 lines to the page. The pages are not relevant to the sort, but the distribution of unactioned tasks may be of interest.

Number of tasks remaining per page (with cumulative total):

Page 1        0         0

Page 2        0         0

Page 3        0         0

Page 4        3         3

Page 5        3         6

Page 6        2         8

Page 7        5       13

Page 8        4       17

Page 9        4       21

Page 10      2       23

Page 11      2       25

Page 12    10       35

Page 13      9       44

Page 14     15      59

Page 15      6       65

A couple of things to note about this:

1) The first 93 tasks on the list have all been actioned in less than a week.

2) No pages except the last one have more than half their tasks unactioned. (The last page only contains 7 tasks at present).

Yesterday’s tasks (4 June)

I kept a record (by using a different coloured ink) of what tasks I entered yesterday and what tasks I completed.

No. of tasks entered during day: 74

No. of those tasks actioned during day: 40

No. of those tasks unactioned at close of day: 34

No. of tasks actioned from previous days: 22

Total tasks actioned during day: 66

Note that the number of tasks currently remaining on the list (65) is slightly less than the number of tasks I succeeded in doing yesterday (66).

A Day with FVP

Here’s what I managed to do today using FVP. The tasks are in the order in which they are written on my list rather than the order I actually did them.

• Phone upgrade
• Reading in the Hadith
• “Penguin Book of Greek Verse”
• Voicemail
• Tidy Office
• Do the Dishes
• Make Tea
• Take Pills
• Check Diary
• Prayer
• Prayer
• Blood Pressure
• Breakfast
• Computer Housekeeping
• Lunch
• Push Ups
• Paper In-Tray
• Bring Wheelie Bin In
• “Harry Potter à l’école des sorciers”
• Website Comments
• Read Blogs
• Glossika French Day 29
• Prayer
• Record Weight
• Computer Housekeeping
• “The Iliad” (in Greek)
• Glossika French Day 29
• Computer Housekeeping
• Computer Housekeeping
• Email
• “Harry Potter à l’école des sorciers”
• Computer Housekeeping
• Push Ups
• Push Ups
• Computer Housekeeping
• “Harry Potter à l’école des sorciers”
• Email Backlog
• Email
• Email Backlog
• Glossika French Day 30
• Book of Genesis (in Hebrew) - one chapter
• Wash Up
• Gospel of Matthew (in Greek) - one chapter
• Book of Genesis (in Hebrew) - one chapter
• Glossika French Day 31
• Glossika French Day 32
• Book of Genesis (in Hebrew) - one chapter
• Gospel of Matthew (in Greek) - one chapter
• Email Backlog
• “Harry Potter à l’école des sorciers”
• Reading in the Hadith
• The Plank
• Find Mislaid Timer
• Write This Blog Post

One thing I’d like to draw attention to is the effectiveness of the system in hammering home projects which require cumulative repetion over a long period. There are several examples of this in the list. I’ll mention only two. “Harry Potter à l’école des sorciers” (the first volume of the Harry Potter series in French) had four sessions and there were three sessions of push ups. Keeping projects like these - reading, language training and fitness training - going day after day with multiple sessions per day really produces results and FVP is excellent at this.

By the way, the idea with the Harry Potter book is that once I’ve finished it in French, I’ll then use the French edition as a crib for the Spanish edition, then the Spanish edition as a crib for the Italian edition, then the Italian edition for the German edition, and the German edition for… who knows which language? Maybe Dutch, maybe Modern Greek. Russian might be too much of a stretch.

The Perfect Time Management System

For millenia the best minds in the world have been searching for the perfect time management system. Finally, after twenty years of thinking about little else (or at least that’s how it felt), I have at last managed to invent it.

I hope this will be an incalculable boon to humankind. Imagine, no more frustration at not being able to trust yourself to achieve what you want. Imagine, always being able to decide to do something and know that you will do it. Imagine, being able to unfailingly steer the optimum path through all the clashing priorities of daily life.

The system is very simple. Once you know it you will be hard pressed to think why it would take one person five minutes to think up, let alone twenty years. Yet, as far as I know no one else has ever thought of it before.

Here are a few characteristics of the system:

• It’s a “universal capture” system, i.e. you can enter any task or project without any pre-editing or prioritizing.
• It’s equally suitable for pen and paper or electronic means.
• It can deal with any size list, from the smallest to the largest.
• No matter what order the tasks are written in, it will always give you the optimum path through them.
• It has no problem with urgent tasks.
• It encourages “little and often”.
• You can attend meetings and write down tasks and queries straight into the list.
• Resistance becomes a thing of the past.
• You can enter provisional tasks, i.e. ones you haven’t decided definitely whether to do them or not.
• You can brainstorm straight onto the list
• It requires no randomizers or other equipment.
• and so on.

I’ll be writing more about this in a week or so’s time.

"Secrets of Productive People" now available for pre-order

My new book Secrets of Productive People: The 50 Strategies You Need to Get Things Done is now available for pre-order in print and Kindle versions on Amazon.co.uk for publication on 27 August.

The Kindle version is also available on Amazon.com.

Daily Rituals

There’s an interesting interview on the Evernote blog with Mason Curry, author of Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.

I particulary liked his description of Maya Angelou renting a “tiny, mean” hotel or motel room in order to do her writing, and surrounding herself with a dictionary, a Bible, a deck of cards, and a bottle of Sherry.

Back in the far-off days before computers that’s probably exactly what I’d have surrounded myself with, except I’d have had a bottle of whisky rather than sherry.

What my new book "Secrets of Productive People" will be about

The main focus of the book will be the idea that productivity is the product of creativity and efficiency.

It’s the creativity part that tends to get neglected, as if productivity were just a matter of churning out as much work as possible.

I want to help the ordinary person - that’s you or me - to be able to approach the sort of results that the really productive people of history such as Newton, van Gogh or Henry Ford have achieved, albeit on a smaller scale. The message is that this sort of ability can be learned. It’s a matter of practice applied to correct methods of practice. The book will show you how.

New book on its way!

I’ve just signed a contract with Hodder’s to write a book in their new Secrets series. It will be called Secrets of Productive People: 50 techniques to get things done, scheduled to be published Summer next year.

"From the Hipster PDA to Desktop Files"

There’s an interesting article on various vehicles for to do lists on Danny Schreiber’s Zapier blog, which mentions a couple of my systems.

I hope he’s corrected the spelling of my name before you all write in and correct him!

How to Get the Most Out of the "Spinning Plates"

This is a follow-up to my previous post The Spinning Plates Method of Project Control, in which I shall be making observations about how best to work this system. It’s not intended to be a static post, but one which I shall keep adding to (newest on top).

Being up-to-date

What does it mean to finish a task in the sense of having no work outstanding as stated in the rules? It doesn’t mean “finished for good”. Basically the sense is that you are up-to-date with the work on the project. You can be up-to-date with a project long before it is finished for good. If you have a project which you expect to take three months, then you are up-to-date as long as you are on track with the schedules and deadlines relating to that project.

So a very important part of running the “Spinning Plates” is being clear what you mean by being “up-to-date”. You may need to have a different definition of this for each project. Sometimes these are set for you, but more often you will need to define them yourself.

If you have a project to read “War & Peace” you might have a goal of so many pages or chapters a day - or you might simply be happy to read “something” every day without defining how long that is. It’s up to you.

For Housework, you might have daily chores, weekly chores (each on a different day of the week) and monthly chores. As long as you are on schedule with these, you are up-to-date.

Electronic Implementation

For electronic implementation, there is no need to have more than the one active column. The columns across the page in the written version look pretty and provide a historical record, but they are not strictly necessary. All you need to know is whether at the end of a pass there are any arrows or crosses in the column. And of course you can use any symbols you like (or colour coding) in place of the ticks, arrows and crosses.

Minor Tasks

It is a good idea fairly early on to add a task called “Minor Tasks” to your list. You can then keep a separate sublist of small necessary tasks which don’t fit into any of the existing projects on the main list. However this must not become a place where you add everything you haven’t yet succeeded in putting on the main list. Remember that like every other task the “Minor Tasks” task must be completely cleared before you can add any more tasks to the main list.

You are therefore advised to use the following rules with respect to the “Minor Tasks” sublist:

1) Don’t add any tasks which are too big to be done in one go.

2) Don’t add more tasks than you can do in one go.

3) Make the “Minor Tasks” sublist a closed list, i.e. no new tasks can be added to it once it has been started until all the tasks on it have been done. I also recommend you do the tasks in the same order they are written.

Size of Tasks

I’ve tended to refer in the instructions to “task” and “project” more or less interchangeably. This is quite deliberate because the system simply treats a project as a big task. Whether a particular entry is a big task or a small task is up to you.

It’s sometimes a good idea to combine small tasks into larger tasks as you go along. So for instance if you have a project to sort out your office, you might start with a task “Sort Desk”. Once the desk is sorted, that is retitled “Tidy Desk”, and you start another task “Sort Pamphlet Racks”. That again becomes “Tidy Pamphlet Racks”. After you’ve done this with a few more office-sorting jobs, you can combine them all into one task “Tidy Office”.

Remember that although you can combine existing tasks, you can only include tasks in the combination which are already on the list.

The best time to do this sort of editing, combining and retitling work is when you are rewriting the page because you have filled all the available columns.