Get Everything Done

Avrum wrote:

"In general, it's the discipline of adhering to the rules, over time, that is an impediment for many people. . . .
From personal and professional experience, I think some combination of the following:
* Accountability
* Deadline(s)
* Passion/interest
* Mindfulness/Discipline
is required to do the things we set out to do. The rules are nice, but not necessary."

I love Avrum. He got me using Evernote for task management and it has been an incredible boon ever since. Because I love him, I take his argument very seriously. What follows is my defense of rules.

I agree that I would love to "do the things" I "set out to do" without imposing rules on myself. But I know, from decades of experience, that I cannot.

What do "accountability," "deadlines," "mindfulness/discipline" mean? They sound to me an awful lot like self-imposed rules.

Here's the problem. When the day has not yet begun, I have an idea of what I want to do. These are the things that I "set out to do." But there is always, in me, a conflict between what I want to do, when that to-do time is in the future, and what I want to do, when that to-do time is now.

At 7 am, the thing that I value highly today, and what I set out to do today, is review the tax payments. But at 9:30 am, when I am at my desk deciding what to do right now, all kinds of things other than tax reviewing have much higher value for me, right now, than tax reviewing.

I am moises and I have a problem. With alcoholic beverages, I don't have a problem. I can do whatever I feel like with regard to alcoholic beverages, and I never get into trouble. But at work, if I do whatever I feel like, I do get into trouble.

The solution to my work problem is to establish patterns so that when I make a decision, it is not a decision about what to do RIGHT NOW, but a decision about how to behave over a longer stretch of time. These decisions are called rules.

Howard Rachlin cites a study of cigarette smokers who are not trying to quit smoking. Researchers tell people to record how many cigarettes they smoke on Monday so that they can use that number to determine how many cigarettes to smoke each day for the rest of the week Tuesday through Sunday. They need to continue recording their daily cigarette number. They are told that the study's goal is to determine how much their daily cigarette total will vary.

They all end up smoking less during the study week than they had been smoking before the study. Why? Because each smoke is no longer an individual act of smoking, decided right now about right now. Instead, each smoke is understood as part of a larger pattern that can be determined only by using a broader time horizon (every day this week). This wider perspective is induced by creating, and following rules.

Avrum does raise the problem that we are free to break rules that we impose on ourselves. And this is correct. Just like we can commit to accountability, deadlines, and mindfulness/discipline and go on to act unaccountably, miss deadlines, and behave in a mindless and undisciplined fashion.

Since, we seem to agree that we want to be accountable and disciplined, it is now an empirical question. What methods increase accountability and discipline?

There is a lot of research in this area. And some of the results are rather clear.

Monitoring behavior increases accountability and discipline. When people write down the things they are doing or have done, even if there are no other rules guiding what they do, they behave in a more accountable and disciplined fashion.

Reducing variability and choice also increase accountability and discipline. Remember the smokers? They were not trying to smoke less. But when they were told to try to smoke the same number of cigarettes each day, they did smoke less. This works not just for smoking, but any other vice.

What distinguishes Mark's systems from GTD is that they reduce variability. I was a GTDer for years before I had heard of Mark. I had all my projects and tasks written and entered in my system. But I was free, at any moment, to do whatever I wanted to do at that moment. I did not reduce my choices. So, I often made bad choices. I would often choose the option that had a lot of value at this instant, but had very low value when looked at from the perspective of hours or days.

All of Mark's systems reduce choice. Usually they do this by restricting the order in which tasks are acted upon. They restrict the order in which tasks are acted upon by creating rules specifying the order in which tasks are accomplished.

Avrum is right, we can violate our rules. But the solution is not therefore to throw out rules. The solution is to stack the odds in a way that we are likely to adhere to the rules.

If we create the rules in a way that allows us to change our perspective from 15 seconds to 15 minutes, we might find that we can do the things we set out to do by following the rules we set out to follow.