Get Everything Done

Using a larger 10cm x 15cm coiled book , 100 pages, I write the list in the back and other things in the front. Ripping out pages that are done. Works pretty well when I stick to it.

Actually, "stick to it" is the issue. The other issue is the scale of tasks. I have my life divided into work and home, though there's also a 3rd category of "out" where I don't get anything done except that one outing. The result is that I don't properly get through the list every day, and that is a problem for a ruleset that is based on the day.

At home, if many days I only have time for a handful of things on certain days, I get a couple entries in the book, look at a few tasks. Then on another day, I have a full 16 hours to do stuff. DDD on stuff from 2 days ago takes all of 30 seconds because there's hardly anything there. This results in a very imbalanced book. Two days after that, I'm supposed to run DDD on an enormous list that was generated on my free day. I don't have the time to cover that, and most of that stuff wasn't given a proper amount of consideration to even act on once before this came up.

I remember reading here about a special exemption to combine two days because one day wasn't as productive, but if that scenario is the norm, I think the system needs a major adjustment to account for this.

At work, it's the same issue but different cause. My core tasks (programming) are complex and take a long time to complete. I break them down as much as is sensible, but they still take 30min to several hours to complete, and the minimal amount of effort at a moment is often 30min. I might spontaneously add a pile of tasks one day, but I can hardly be expected to do anything on most of these within two days. I can be expected to do something on them within 2 weeks though, and there are smaller tasks jumbled in with these bigger ones. It's a different scale of operating.

I'm going over remedies in my mind, but it's painfully obvious that processing everything two days old isn't working.

About the DDD issue, I have found a tweak that serves me well. The normal rule of DDD everything 2 days old was a problem because sometimes it was a tiny amount, and sometimes was a huge amount, and didn't reflect the amount of time I had to devote.

Instead, I now DDD exactly 1 page. I run this process only if the page is more than 3 pages back, and I only tackle 1 page at a time before resuming normal operations. You could choose a number different from 3. For context, I run 2 columns on a page, 50 items. Following this rule, I rarely have even 10 items to tackle on the page so it's quick.

I don't believe so, because the amount of time I have varies day to day and is irregular. Deferring after 2 days would at times force me to commit a large number of tasks outside of the system to be dealt with later, and that outside-the-system is not effectively managed as much as inside the system.

This simple adjustment allows my natural variance in available time to even out over time such that very little requires deferring. It's much cleaner.

<< that is what he did mean, though I had originally taken him to mean what you now think is his correct meaning. Whereas his correct meaning is what you originally though to be his correct meaning, but now believe to be incorrect.. >>

I have NO idea if this is correct or incorrect.

<<Yes, and I suppose this could give us a working definition of "overload": If you need to declare a new backlog in any of those areas before an already-existing backlog is cleared, then you are overloaded.>>

This is a great insight.

<<Or another way to say the same thing: If any of your backlogs becomes an open list, then you are overloaded.>>

That's a very visceral way of looking at it.