Get Everything Done

In More on the Procrastination Buster, MF writes "to make a difficult or unwelcome task seem relatively easier, ... [pit] it against an even more difficult or unwelcome task. One way you could do this if you have a long to do list is by having a rule that you have to action half the items on a page (rounded up) before you can move onto the next page. Each time you get to the end of the list, you start again from the beginning."

I've been experimenting with this idea with my in-tray. Consistent with DIT principles concerning closed lists, I don't process incoming material today. I let it collect in my in-tray, unless it is clearly very urgent. The following morning, I tip the tray out on my desk, and start processing it. I do the whole thing if I can, which is what DIT would recommend. But I have a get-out for hard to handle things: I allow myself to put up to half of the papers back in the in-tray. The half that is unprocessed are the "even more unwelcome tasks" that makes rest seem easier.

I've found this so effective in getting me to shift the hated paperwork that I've been thinking about the maths of it. If incoming paperwork dried up suddenly, my in-tray would soon empty. I'd do at least half today, a quarter (a half of the remaining half) tomorrow, an eighth the day after that; after seven days less than 1% of the in-tray would remain.

But incoming paperwork doesn't try up. It comes in every day, some days a lot, some days a little, occasionally nothing. It doesn't take much maths to convince yourself that at the end of Friday, your in tray will have in it (on average) all of Friday's stuff, plus half of Thursday's and a quarter of Wednesday's and an eighth of Tuesday's and so on, which adds up to two day's worth of papers. Full-fat DIT would have just one day's worth, the current day's, since you'd have cleared out everything previous to that. So doing half of your in-tray amounts to Do It The Day After Tomorrow (DITDAT).

In theory, therefore, DIT has a typical reaction time of 24 hours, and DITDAT has a typical reaction time of 48 hours. In practice, I find it hard to be perfect at DIT, so the actual reaction time averages out at more than 24 hours, narrowing the gap between the techniques. And DITDAT is easier, for the reasons articulated by MF in the Procrastination Buster.

Of course, while DIT's reaction time of 24 hours is a certainty, assuming you never backslide, DITDAT's 48 hours is just a typical time, based on the 2-day size of the backlog. Easy papers get processed within 24 hours, just like DIT; and hard papers can be procrastinated over for days. The extreme version of this is that some really nasty task can lurk for ever among the unprocessed half of the papers, never to be confronted (though it would still be proving valuable in making you favour all the other tasks). I find in practice that natural variations in the flow of paperwork mean that there are enough days when almost nothing arrives, allowing the process-half-the-in-tray-rule to take the number of papers down to zero.

This method is proving so effective for me that I am tipping a few papers every day into the in-tray from a pile in the corner. The years-old backlog is visibly depleting and will be gone in a week or two at this rate.