Get Everything Done

For devotees of "Dreams," how do you stay organized?

Have you kept up your AF/SF notebook?
Do you need only the occasional scribbled paper scrap?
Has Pull Mode moved you into the ethereal realm of Keeping It All In Your Head?

How do you keep the plants watered, the insurance application followed up, the children driven to all the right places on time, your Thursday exercise routine completed, and your checking account up to date?

Sure, these things are all parts of your Vision, but they are so *detailed*, so picky, so easily overlooked! Or are they?

What sorts of reminders do you need in Pull Mode? What sorts of structures have you tried? How have they worked for you?

Do tell.
Thanks for sharing!

In another thread, I mentioned writing a daily "dashboard," which is my big picture of everything impacting today (see "HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN TIME MANAGEMENT SYSTEM" http://www.markforster.net/forum/post/1528283).

My dashboard is essential to my day, because my mind gets extremely compartmentalized, tuning out even the most essential elements of life when I am doing focused work. While that has helped me accomplish some brilliant things in the past, it is lousy for keeping commitments. It didn't matter when I worked in a cubicle (and didn't have kids!), because I only had a few deep-thought things to do all day--heaven help the hapless fool who might have called me while I was *thinking*!! Now, I cannot function that way.

The "dashboard" is my best coping strategy so far:

Place a sheet of paper horizontally, and fold it once to the right to make a booklet. The booklet has four "pages": a front cover, two inner facing pages, and a back cover. Each of these pages has two vertical columns, so that there are eight columns total. I take the booklet everywhere, and at the end of the day, I make tomorrow's.


Front cover:

Today's schedule - left column
- (anything tied to a time of day)
- appointments
- reminders to bring things to appointments
- driving/car-pooling arrangements
- odd reminders (feed pets while wife out of town)
- triggers to complete a checklist (see back cover)

"One day's work" (DIT-based) - right column
- Current Initiative
- Urgent items needing attention any time today
- Inbox scan
--- three checkboxes = three quick email checks
- Pending boxes
--- email, paper, OmniFocus, computer desktop
--- checkbox for each = completed today's work
--- (per DIT, today's work = stuff that arrived yesterday)
- Routines
--- today's part of any exercise/practice routines


Back cover:

Checklists - left column
- to-do every morning
- to-do every evening
- to-do in making tomorrow's dashboard

5-week calendar grid - upper right column
- just the numbers, holidays highlighted
- no engagements listed
- e.g., for wondering what date is two Tuesdays off

Notes - lower right column
- empty spot to write with pen


Inner left page:
(not getting much use, needs redesign)

Waiting for - upper left column
- anything to follow up on

Deferred - lower left column
- occasional item removed from another section that I don't know what to do with
- became a sort of "dismissal ground" for dashboard items
- silly thing, really; should have written in SF

Practice - right column
- an entire week of exercise/practice
- laid out for easy copy/paste onto front cover
- just for reference; the "real" to-do appears on front cover


Inner right page:

Errands - left column
- Very useful!!
- any errands I've thought of lately
- continually re-sorted for priority
- continually regrouped based on location & other outings
- notes about stores already searched for an item
- reminders to bring a coupon or discount card

Available - right column
- not used currently


I compose the dashboard each night in Apple's "Pages" application, which is a real joy to use. A dedicated checklist reduces this process to a bunch of easy steps, so it is not too bad an experience, and I know I won't miss anything. Operating strictly in Pull Mode, I am sufficiently motivated to complete it 5 or 6 nights out of the week. The nights I skip tend to preceed simpler days when it's not really needed.

A word about how my "dashboard" grew alongside SuperFocus and the transition to "Dreams":

The dashboard began its life as a source to feed Column Two of my SuperFocus notebook. It was largely equivalent to other people's Outlook reminders, except that I wanted something that worked away from the computer, and I really crave the at-a-glance big picture. Do I have half a dozen C2 items lurking for later today, or am I free to let all sorts of things stand out? The dashboard worked, and after some effort to streamline the nightly process of creating it, the payoff kept me motivated to keep it going.

Then I read DIT, and the dashboard absorbed that wonderful notion of "one day's work," particularly taming the bottomless email pit, also transforming my incoming paper bin. These inbox/processing tasks could have been "recurring tasks" in SuperFocus C1, but as my cycling through the list was unreliable, I found it more practical to put them on the dashboard to feed through C2 as needed.

Finally, along came "Dreams." Theoretically, I imagined SuperFocus might fade away as Pull Mode took over, but I didn't really believe it. So many details there are in life, Pull Mode or not! Surely SuperFocus would only become more brilliant when fed by Pull Mode.

Well, Column Two quickly fell away, and it's easy to see why, with its Push nature. My SuperFocus became AutoFocus. But even then I used it less and less. I can't say why, analytically, but today I scarcely look at it, and it is on the verge of becoming another backlog. I scan it each night while making the dashboard, and I consult it once or twice a day when I have a small corner of time and am wondering if there's some tiny useful thing I could fit in. I rarely write more than three items in it a day.

Instead, Pull Mode typically leads me to one major item (project/topic) per day, plus anything triggered by the dashboard. There just isn't that much to write down.

One day recently, I was forced to juggle several projects at once, and I constructed a sort of one-page SuperFocus, showing a column of important goals alongside some smaller items to work in during breaks. This was fun and worked brilliantly, so I thought I would keep using it, but I didn't. With the pressure off, I felt no need.

The dashboard is far from perfect, and I look forward to watching it improve.

I'm sure other readers have some killer ideas I can steal, so I hope others will contribute their experiences to this thread. Thanks!

Not at all, Carsten. Your English is very good!

About email, have you read Mark's _Do It Tomorrow_? Its principles are really helpful for staying up to date with incoming email, paper, phone calls, even your own notes and to-dos.

I no longer act on email as it arrives, because that makes email an open list. Instead, I leave today's email in the Inbox (except urgent items that *cannot* wait one day, and I delete junk immediately). At night, I move the whole inbox into my Pending folder.

Every day, Pending has one day's work: a closed list of yesterday's email, plus any older items that needed more than a day.

You can work on Pending in Push Mode by making yourself clear it every day. You can work on it in Pull Mode by keeping an eye on the growing list and watching for that "stand out" feeling of available energy to clear it or at least make a dent. If you care about being up to date, you probably will end up clearing it often.

For me, the Pending list is a like mini-dashboard. Because of the "one day's work" principle, one glance shows me how urgent it is to work on email. Using the "Dreams" method, I have skipped several days in a row when the folder had little in it and wasn't growing much. But when the message list gets near a screenful, or it has important things in it, I'm always motivated to empty it out. If the folder has stayed near a screenful for a while, I'll put a note on my dashboard that email is kind of full. Not an instruction to work on it, mind you; just an FYI that it's reached that level. When I see that on my dashboard later, it factors into my feeling about what to do next.

Though _Do It Tomorrow_ teaches a specific approach to time management, its principles will apply to most any other approach too. The book is a valuable read for anyone.

Some progress to report:

My notebook has become more active again and has taken a load off the dashboard. The notebook is no longer process-oriented but much more display oriented. Imagine SF with the rules redesigned to group tasks together for visual "dashboard"-ish clarity rather than to push you through your work.

A full writeup is here, at the entry of July 17, 2011 at 6:29:
http://www.markforster.net/forum/post/1546612

My dashboard is now much easier to prepare each night. I only need to copy in my schedule and any routines that vary from day to day. Daily checklists stay in place unchanged, and there are usually one or two updates to the Errands list or Waiting-for.

Progress!

Who would've thought it?

AutoFocus v1 is *excellent*!

Having joined this party just in time for SuperFocus v3, I never did use pure AF1 (though I think I dabbled briefly in AF4). My SF experience led me to imagine AF1 as SF's slower-witted cousin. Without that C2, you know, to pull things along, all unfinished items go to the very final end, and it might be quite a few page turns before you see them again.

But this is NOT what it's like to use AF1! As Mark recently pointed out, you can *fly* through an AF1 notebook. See, without that C2 forcing you to push along every unfinished item and every urgency with every single page turn, you can flip pages as fast as you care to: just find one stand-out and do one little thing on it. That is, if you feel the end-of-list pulling your attention. If you don't feel pressed, of course, then take your time page by page.

Meanwhile, terribly urgent items are exceptions to be worked outside of the list. Really, how many of these will you have? Jot them on stickies, and they'll be gone soon anyway, by force of schedule.

I see now why Mark habitually falls back to AF1 and why he has reported that it is his favorite of all the variations. It is soooo flexible, really! It seems to me that all the trouble I had with SF, all the flexibility I was wishing for in my rotation of projects, etc.—as far as I can tell at this point—is available in AF1 quite easily.

Wow. Who knew?

Needless to say, my little customized system described above did not survive past the "critical mass" point of stale pages and dismissals.

This is my 2nd day in AF1, and perhaps I will hit the wall here too after pages mount. But I sure feel like I am much, *much* better equipped for dismissal this time, so we shall see. Part of my new formula for success here is that I have developed a place to list things that have been dismissed and will not be entered back into the notebook for a while. It is basically a handful of queues which I can review and sort at leisure while the items are ripening.

Worst case, I am sure to get a good month of AutoFocus flow out of this experiment. Best case, I will have some success with dismissal this time and find myself in a good rhythm.

Here's to AutoFocus!!