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The actual list is at http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2009/9/4/working-live-today.html but it appears that the link to Andreas's brilliant live action intepretation of it is no longer valid.
The system being illustrated is AF4.
http://web.archive.org/web/20111129162935/http://autofocus.cc/public/data/af4-demo.pdf
Great sleuthing!
I'd like to get this available directly on this blog, so I'll email Andreas and ask if he's happy for me to use it.
Note to anyone who is thinking of using this:
Get the page size on the file equal to your window/screen size, then you can just keep pressing the next page key and you will see it in live action.
you already asked for and got permission to host it directly: markforster. squarespace .com/ forum/ post/ 882055 (I had to butcher the URL because I couldn't get past the captcha.)
Regards,
Andreas
I shared the idea of the long list and simple scanning with my mom yesterday. She was mentioning how she had so many things to do and she gets distracted all the time by random tasks as she's walking around the house. It was great to see her write down 12 things off the top of her head "oh yeah, I need to do this....oh yeah, I also need to call...". We'll see how it goes.
Mark, from reading your blogs, it seems like you keep coming back often to simple scanning. Is that the system that you are using today? I am interested in trying AF4 again, since I'm noticing that my list is getting really long. I have some tasks that haven't been actioned for 8 or 9 days. I really want to get to them, but I've been working a lot of overtime, and have very limited spare time at home to work on them. Learning how to dismiss is something I'm not too skilled at yet. I tend to hang onto things simply because I know I want to do it, but I just haven't been able to get to it for a week or more.
One thing that worries me with something like AF4, would be the feeling of being "trapped" in your closed list for a while, when you really need to get to something right away in your open list. It seems that urgent items could suffer with this system when they are in the open list.
I think that's exactly the line of thinking that lead to Mark's development of SuperFocus with its two columns.
Yes, what Andreas says about the SuperFocus development is correct.
But these days, whatever system I'm using, I tend to follow the "if it needs doing now, just do it" rule.
In fact at the moment I'm still using the "Another Simple and Effective Method" http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2013/5/20/another-simple-and-effective-method.html which I mentioned the other day. It's worked very well over the last week or so in getting a lot of work finished before a holiday deadline. So well in fact that I'm thinking of sticking with it. In spite of what it says in the article, it's important with this system that the list isn't allowed to get too long. I find 100 tasks to be the realistic upper limit.
<<"I tend to follow the "if it needs doing now, just do it" rule.>>
I like this rule. To clarify, would you say that this is the same thing as a rule that states "you can basically skip forward to any item in your long list whenever you want to without having to scan your way there." Or, is the "now" part of your wording the criterion that allows for you to just do it without scanning your way there on the list (which is different than the "want" part of my wording"?
I think with simple scanning you do not need to necessarily dismiss. But, you may want to look at Mark's DWM method which is my favorite way to do dismissal. In brief:
Any newly entered task expires after 30 days, if not acted on even in part.
Once an item is acted on in part (WIP), you have 7 days to act some more on it, otherwise it expires.
<< To clarify, would you say that this is the same thing as a rule that states "you can basically skip forward to any item in your long list whenever you want to without having to scan your way there." Or, is the "now" part of your wording the criterion that allows for you to just do it without scanning your way there on the list (which is different than the "want" part of my wording"? >>
I think that's making a very simple concept into something complex.
"... just do it now, without even bothering to write it down or find it on the list"
I'm finding this simplicity to be very important.
It reminds me of something I read in Theory of Constraints. It's pretty straightforward to come up with a buffering system that keeps a factory or a supply chain running really smoothly 95% of the time, requiring expediting and overriding only 5% of the time -- which is generally a huge improvement over whatever the factory / supply chain was doing previously. But trying to get to 99% or 100% requires far more effort and is just too costly.
Trying to get the rules of a time management system to handle automatically 100% of everything life throws at you is a similar problem. It's just not worth the cost. The rules become too complex. If you need to override the rules 5% of the time -- just override the rules, "do it now", etc. So what if it's not "perfect" -- it's probably still orders of magnitude better than whatever we were doing previously.
Maybe some of this misunderstanding stemmed from a line from the blog post 10 advantages of the long list: "Every task you are thinking of doing has to be written down, put on the list and subjected to the selection procedure. This is a very effective way of avoiding impulsive activity." It sounds like to me this has an asterisk next to it: *if you need to override the rules 5% of the time, just override the rules, like Seraphim wrote.