And now for something completely different...

Three times in my life I’ve managed to lose a significant amount of weight through dieting - each time it’s been a different diet but the rate of loss with all three has been about 1 lb a week.

Unfortunately once I’ve lost the weight I’ve always been faced with the same two problems:

1. I haven’t been able to stop myself putting the weight on again.
2. I haven’t been able to keep to the same diet a second time.

I’ve been reading quite a lot recently about the benefits of fasting, which are far from just confined to weight loss apparently. I won’t go into what they are as, if you are interested, you can easily research them on the internet.

I decided to embark on a fairly intensive diet in which I ate normally on alternate days followed by a day in which I ate no more than 600 calories.

This worked very well to start off with. I didn’t find it difficult to keep to and I lost about 6 lbs fairly quickly. Then I found that I was no longer losing weight. I seemed to put on as much weight on the non-fasting days as I lost on the fasting days. This wasn’t due to bingeing on the non-fast days. I wasn’t tempted to binge in the slightest.

So I decided to up the stakes and go for a full 24 hours on and 24 hours off alternate day fast. This is supposed to be very beneficial but is also supposed to be very difficult to keep to. But it struck me that there was a very simple way of making this much easier. All one had to do was to make the change-over between the days at 12 noon instead of 12 midnight. This would mean that I would be getting the benefits of a full 24-hours without food, but still getting at least one meal every day.

So the days look like this:

Day 1 Breakfast

Day 2 Lunch and Supper

Day 3 Breakfast

Day 4 Lunch and Supper

Day 5 Breakfast

and so on.

The result of doing this has been fantastic. I’ve continued to lose weight (at about 2 lbs per week). I’ve only felt pleasantly hungry - otherwise I’ve felt great, with a lot more energy. I’ve not been tempted to binge, and I actually prefer being on the diet to not being on it.

One problem with diets like this is social events. I don’t live in isolation. There are plenty of occasions when I want to celebrate or I’ve been invited out, or there’s a celebration on a special day. How do I handle these?

1. I never deviate from the basic 24-on/24-off rhythm. That means that I know in advance which days are going to be “on” and which “off”. So as far as possible I plan my social calendar so that eating out takes place on “off diet” days. However that’s not going to work for everthing, so:
2. I have perfected the art of sitting at a dining table and watching other people eat. I think about it in the same light as watching a cooking programme on TV. In other words I think of it as an enjoyable experience, and not as a battle against temptation. And it really works! This is OK for family members and others who are used to my strange ways, but like 1. above is not going to work for every situation - so:
3. If all else fails, the diet is sufficiently robust to survive occasionally adding an extra meal in. You would still ony be eating 2 meals that day. But it’s really important to make these exceptions as rare as possible.

I’ll report on further progress (or lack of it!) in due course. I’m hoping that this is going to be something that solves the two problems I had with my three earlier diets.

The One Must-Do Task Each Day

Many of you will know that I’m a fan of Beeminder - “goal tracking with teeth”. This is a guest post by Alice Harris, long-time reader of this blog. It is crossposted on the Beeminder Blog

Beeminder’s brilliant for encouraging yourself to Do Important Stuff. It’s turned me from the person who every week would remorsefully discard a fridge full of perished vegetables, into the person who has consistently eaten an average of 7 servings of fruit and vegetables a day for a straight run of 210 days! I’m also the person who exercises (okay, a little bit…), doesn’t eat too much chocolate, and hardly ever bites her nails.

But Beeminder doesn’t have to be for specific goals and projects. It can also help you action all those unrelated, one-off, annoying little tasks that you’ve been putting off for weeks. If you’re as much of a procrastinator as I am, then I’m sure you have some. I have many, but with Beeminder I’m slowly getting through them all. My Do One Must-Do Task Each Day goal is an idea that I shamelessly stole from Beeminder co-founder Danny Reeves, and if you look at my datapoints you can see the variety of actions I’ve been using it for.

To set up your own Must-Do goal, select Beeminder’s standard “Do More” goal. I unticked the “Start on a flat road” option because I wanted to be forced to get moving on my tasks straight away. If you’re new to Beeminder or don’t want the immediate pressure, then beginning with a flat road is probably a good idea. That gives you a gentle, forgiving start on the road towards awesome anti-procrastination-ness. Whenever you’re ready for pressure, dial in a weekly rate of 7. This will encourage you to do a Must-Do task every day.

For each day, you’ll be choosing a task to accomplish — something you otherwise would probably not have done on that day but something you’d really like to get done. At the end of the day, if you did that task, you enter “1” as your datapoint. If you didn’t do the task, you enter “0” — and perhaps fall off the yellow brick road!

When you enter your datapoint, use the comment to specify what your task will be for the next day. This keeps the momentum going, encourages you to think each night about what you’d really like to achieve on the next day, and records your commitment in writing. All of these things help in the fight against procrastination.

When I’m entering my comment, I like to use wording such as “On Monday I will clean the bath” (where Monday is the next day). Specifying the precise day and using a positive phrase like “I will” helps to focus my mind on the fact that this task IS something that WILL be done and the day on which it WILL be done is MONDAY. It leaves me with no wriggle room!

The kinds of tasks you choose for your Must-Do goal are really up to you. Select anything that you’ve been putting off no matter how minor or silly. Sometimes I use my Must-Do goal to force myself to do easy, five-minute tasks that for some bizarre reason I have been avoiding. Just don’t pick something too difficult or too time-consuming to be easily finished in one day (along with all the other stuff you have to fit into that day!). If there is something big that you really need prodding for, just enter one small step. Instead of “On Monday I will write the TPS report” try “On Monday I will start the TPS report” or “On Monday I will write one page of the TPS report”. Scary monster tasks become much more manageable when you chop bits off them.

But of course if you want to tackle monsters head-on, you can always chain a few tasks together: “On Monday I will wash the sheets AND disinfect the floors AND toilet-train the dog.” If you’re feeling up to it, be ambitious and indomitable!

A Must-Do goal can be a useful adjunct to a normal task management system. I usually use Mark Forster’s Autofocus at home and Final Version at work and they’re very good at helping to overcome procrastination, but even they can’t always get me moving on actions that I’m stubbornly avoiding. The commitment of a Beeminder pledge gives me the extra impetus I need. And on days when I have so little discretionary time that I don’t get around to opening my todo list, my Must-Do goal ensures that I do achieve at least one thing of importance to me!

You can also use a Must-Do goal to achieve a helpful state of mind during stressful times. If you know that tomorrow will be especially difficult, perhaps from extra duties in your job or a big family gathering, then spend a bit of time the night before thinking about what you’ll need to do or how you’ll need to feel to get through the day, and base your comment around that. “On Monday I will remain calm and will ask for help when I need it. With patience and careful work I can stay in control and fulfill my duties.” Throughout the day, leave a browser window open showing your pretty Beeminder graph with your string of successes so far and let it be a reminder of how much you can achieve with just a little a bit of dedication. When evening comes and you need to enter your datapoint, don’t judge yourself too harshly — if you did better than you feared, then that’s a success!

If you’re finding yourself interested in a Beeminder Must-Do goal, give it a go. You don’t have to pledge money straight away (or ever if the graph itself is sufficiently motivating) so it’s a risk-free experiment. For your first task, choose the first thing that pops into your head. For your next day’s task, choose whatever you happen to think of when you’re recording your first day’s success. You don’t need to plan out a sequence of tasks or keep a list for future days. If you discover one evening that you can’t think of a Must-Do task for the next day, that means you’ve done all of the important things you’ve been putting off! When I get to that point, I intend to enter “On Tuesday I will revel in my awesomeness!”

Newsletter Archive Now Available

You can now access the archive for the Final Version newsletter by using the “View our Archive” button underneath the subscription box in the right margin.

Q&A Session postponed

Due to continuing demands on my time, I am having to postpone the Q&A session again. I’m not going to arrange a new date until things have settled down a bit.

New date for Q&A Session: April 23

Due to personal reasons, I am having to postpone the Q&A Session conference call for a week. The new date is April 23. The time remains 8 p.m. UK Time.

I originally intended it to be a free session, but I wanted to limit the attendees to 20 so everyone on the call would have a chance to speak. Unfortunately past experience indicates that when a session is free of charge there is a tendency for people to book but not turn up. This prevents people who do want to attend from being able to. I’ve therefore decided to charge a nominal fee of £5 (approx US$8). This will have the additional advantage of testing my payment and booking procedures.

Booking will open in a few days. I will announce it on the blog and in my newsletter.

Final Version a great success!

The Final Version has now gone out to over 4,000 subscribers and the feed-back has been uniformly good. It seems to have really caught people’s imagination.

I’m now in the process of writing the second issue of the Final Version newsletter which should be out in a few days.

Other projects which are featuring large in my FV list are getting the booking opened and other preparations finalized for the Q & A session on 16th April and drawing up a schedule of further teleconfence calls and seminars.

View from the verandah

This is the view from the verandah (when it’s not raining) as I work on The Final Version in the depths of the Australian outback.

Free Q&A Session

There will be a FREE Q&A Session about the Final Version by teleconference call on Monday April 16th at 8 pm (UK Time). Numbers limited to 20. Pre-registration will be required. Details soon.

More Holiday Tasks

Here’s some more tasks residing on my holiday FV list:

• Redesign the About page so it majors on FV [done]
• Make the About page the Home page again [done]
• Publish a schedule of teleconferences
• Set up an ordering system for teleconferences
• Plan further marketing
• Continue to write book

Discussion Forums

I have introduced a new discussion forum FV Forum solely for discussing issues related to the Final Version time management system. I’ve closed the Comments on the last two blog posts in order to direct comments to the Forum.

The existing forum has been renamed General Forum and is for issues related to time management in general and previous time management systems of mine.

For an experimental period both forums are accessed by Captcha - I hope this will be sufficient to keep spam to an acceptable level (i.e. none at all). If this doesn’t prove to be the case then I will have to re-introduce posting by registered members only.

I’m also for an experimental period removing moderation from blog comments and relying on Captcha only.

Final Version Instructions now issued

If you have signed up for the Final Version newsletter, check your email. The first issue, which contains the full instructions for the new system, was issued at 10.30 a.m. Queensland time today March 13th to 2,007 subscribers.

If you haven’t already signed up, then you can do so by filling in the Subscribe Email Newsletter box in the right margin. Some people are finding the sign-on instructions a bit difficult to follow since they don’t mention the Final Version (I don’t have much control over the wording) - just answer every question positively!

I intend to send out the instructions at least once a day to new subscribers who missed the first distribution. Please be patient - this is not an autoresponder.

The Final Version is here!

My long-awaited Final Version time management system is ready for release, and the good news is that it will be free of charge. I am starting a new newsletter for the purpose of distributing the initial instructions for the new system - and later on the newsletter will include in-depth articles about it.

To sign up for the Final Version newsletter, fill in the Subscribe Email Newsletter form in the right margin. If you are already a subscriber to my existing newsletter, you will be asked whether you want to update your profile. The answer is yes, you do!

Please note that the instructions will not be distributed in my existing newsletter, nor will they appear on this website, so if you don’t sign up you won’t receive them.

The instructions will be issued to all subscribers to the Final Version newsletter within the next few days.

Every issue of the newsletter will contain an Unsubscribe link, so you can unsubscribe even more easily than you subscribe.

(And btw the new system is called the Final Version not because it’s the final word on time management for all time, but because it’s definitely the final time management system that I will be producing!)

New thoughts on the Final Version

I’ve had a radical rethink about the marketing of the Final Version. Instead of releasing it by publishing a book, my plan is now to release it free of charge as instructions only in an issue of my newsletter. I may start a new newsletter for the purpose, so wait for further instructions before signing up if you don’t already receive it.

I will then run a programme of reasonably cheap teleconferences and/or seminars to fill in the reality behind the instructions and deal with questions and difficulties.

I haven’t decided on a release date yet, but since it no longer depends on my getting a book written there is no reason why it can’t be sooner rather than later.

Final Version Situation - 2

There’s not been a lot of progress since I last posted due to the fact that I have been travelling constantly and it’s not been helped by my lap-top breaking. I’ve now reached my location for the next month, a fairly remote part of Queensland, so I now have the opportunity to get on with the book without too many interruptions - apart from the expected birth of a grandchild sometime in the next few weeks!

In the meantime I am very grateful for the many suggestions which the readers of this blog have left concerning the marketing of the book once I have written it. Please continue to make these!

Final Version Situation

I’ve got to the point with the Final Version that I am ready to start writing the book in which the system will be described. I intend to do this over the next six weeks while I am on holiday. The book will only be as long as is necessary to give a full description of the system and the principles behind it.

During this period I will also be deciding what format the book will be published in. It is not my intention at the moment to have the book published by a conventional publisher. But I’ve made no further decisions.

Methods I don't recommend (revisited)

When I recently revised the About page (which previously was the Home page), I left out a large chunk of text which I didn’t feel necessarily agreed with my current thinking. Bear in mind that the page was written before I had designed any systems subsequent to Do It Tomorrow (which is still a really good system by the way!)

Having hidden the text away in Evernote, I decided just now to have another look at it and comment on its continuing relevance or otherwise.

So let’s have a look (original text in italics):

Prioritizing by Importance
Prioritizing by importance is a cause of bad time management, not a cure for it! Just how impressed would you be if your new car didn’t have wing mirrors because the factory thought the engine was more important than the wing mirrors? If it needs to be done, then it needs to be done, period.

I still agree with that 100 per cent. However perhaps it needs adding that Importance is the right way to decide what your commitments should be in the first place. You commit to what is important to you, your work and your life. However once you have made the commitments Importance is not the right way to decide in what order to do the resulting work.

Prioritizing by Urgency
Ok, so we sometimes have real emergencies which need an immediate response. You will recognise these when they happen - you don’t need to sit down and allocate them a priority. But let’s face it, all your other “urgent priorities” are only urgent because you have left them to the last minute. And why have you left them to the last minute? - because you are prioritizing by urgency, that’s why!

I hadn’t appreciated an important distinction about Prioritizing by Urgency when I wrote the above. This has since become clearer to me.

The reason Urgency has got a bad name is that people think that it means that we only take action on a task when it becomes urgent.

However what “Prioritizing by Urgency” should mean is that we do things according to the degree of urgency they possess. The degree of urgency may fall anywhere between Must be Done This Second to Not at All Urgent. Where a task falls on this continuum is the deciding factor. This is a sensible method of prioritizing.

To Do Lists
A to do list is the finest known way of ensuring that you never get to the end of your work. The proof? How often have you ended the day with more items on your to do list than you started it with? Me, I finish all my work, just about every day. And I can teach you to do the same.

I still agree with this if one is talking about the standard To Do list of most people’s imagination. However there are various sophisticated ways of working a To Do list which are a great improvement. In order to avoid confusion I have usually given them a different name for my own systems, e.g. The Will Do list (Do It Tomorrow) or the Autofocus list for (for my various Autofocus systems).

Another good question

Bernie asks in the comments for my post A Good Question:

Can you tell us how the Final Version improves upon DWM?

My answer

1. It doesn’t rely on expiry deadlines to provide the motive power.

2. It’s much more immediate in producing the right task at the right time.

3. It doesn’t leave you with an indigestible chunk of difficult tasks which have to be done or lost.

4. It deals with all tasks on the same basis.

5. It produces a much greater degree of psychological readiness.

6. It’s easier to keep the entire list under control.

7. It doesn’t allow tasks to build up resistance.

8. It works equally well with a short list as a long list.

9. It’s easy to extract a shorter list (e.g. for travel) and use the same methods to process the shorter list.

I’m sure I can think of some more if I try!

Autofocus 1 now in Romanian

Thanks to Vaida Bogdan for translating the original Autofocus instructions into Romanian. The translation can be found here.

Jak si splnit sny

How to Make Your Dreams Come True has now been translated into Czech, thanks to the efforts of Víťa Šmíd. You can download it from his website here.

Víťa has also put an interesting article called 5 Things I Learned Translating “How to Make Your Dreams Come True” on his English language blog.

Taking My Own Advice?

Several of my past articles have been reproduced with my permission on the new Pitstop for Business website. They are:

Urgency: The Natural Way to Prioritize

Expand Your Ideas the Easy Way

Whole Hearted Living

Dealing With Projects That Don’t Have a Deadline

Looking at these articles again, outside the context of my own website, caused me to wonder how much of my own advice I was currently following. Of course with the hundreds of articles on my site it would be physically impossible for one person to put into effect every suggestion or piece of advice. But these particular articles are ones that have been selected by someone else as being particularly relevant. So how do I measure up myself?

Urgency? Yes, that’s fine. I am building urgency into my Final Version time management system as part of the way that it prioritizes. It’s not “pure” urgency as such because other factors are taken into account, but it’s probably more urgency-friendly than any other system I have come across.

Expanding my ideas by repeated drafting is something that I don’t use as often as I ought to. It is a method that works, and works very well - especially with article-length passages. I do still however have a tendency to write the article in one draft and use later revisions only for tidying it up. In fact that’s the way that I’m writing this article. I’m conscious though that quite a lot is missed out by doing it that way. Working gradually up from one or two short phrases gives a more rounded end product. Memo to self: start using this again.

Whole-hearted living? Of course being retired is the ideal time for whole-hearted living. Free of the constraints of bosses and clients, I’ve now got the time to do the things I really want to do. So am I doing them? I’ve written before that my idea of retirement was that I would spend my time walking, reading books and maybe take up something like learning a musical instrument. Is life like that? No! Memo to self: ask myself how much of what I’m doing at the moment I am doing whole heartedly.

Projects that don’t have a deadline? This is advice that I’ve been neglecting, especially the bit about doing them one at a time. I’ve fallen into the trap of thinking that running several of these projects at once is faster. The number of languishing unfinished projects I have is ample evidence that it’s not! Memo to self: follow the four-stage process in the article.