Get Everything Done

The worst things about Long Lists, in my opinion, are that they seem to gravitate to "easy" and "time waster" tasks to the detriment of harder, more important tasks, and that they seem to have a finicky relationship with "urgent" tasks. However, my months of using "Task Tracking" have shown me that these weaknesses may actually be related and thus pointed me to a possible joint solution.

To present the solution properly we have to discuss two key concepts of Mark Forster's thinking: his concept that there are no such things as "procrastination" and "resistance", and his concept of "urgency".

The first concept is found here: http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2018/10/13/problem-3-resistance.html

This is the concept of "readiness": the feelings that we have of "resistance" are actually our intuition telling us that "the time is not right to do this", and the times that tasks "stand out" are the times our intuition tells us that "now is the right time to do it". There is thus no such thing as "procrastination", but only that there are "inappropriate times" to do some things.

The problem with this however is that the easiest, most pleasurable things to do tend to be the things most often done because they seem to be always appropriate to do, and the harder, often more important things tend to be left out. Intuition is stupid like that because it uses the "reward system" of the brain: the pleasure of finishing many easy tasks and doing leisurely tasks are the signals to our intuition that they are the "right thing to do".

The second concept is discussed here: http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2012/1/26/urgency-the-natural-way-to-prioritize.html

Here Mark Forster introduced the concept that urgency is not to decide when to do a task, but rather it is to decide when to start a task. I think this is one of his most brilliant concepts because it integrates the traditional concepts of "importance" and "urgency", which is presented best by the "Eisenhower Matrix" or "Eisenhower Box" (http://jamesclear.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/eisenhower-box-preview.jpg ), into one. For example, in the traditional way of thinking, exercise, though important, is not urgent, and therefore it is one of the most often tasks to be not done. However, using Mark's concept, exercise is one of the most urgent tasks because one has to start doing it consistently to have any benefits from it in the near future.

Traditional concept of it or not, I think Long Lists have always had a problem handling urgent tasks because it focuses on readiness, not urgency. And yet I think Mark Forster's concept of urgency, because it also integrates importance, can solve Long Lists' main problem of preferring "time wasters" by adding it as a secondary criterion.

I therefore introduce the "Forster Box" or "Forster Matrix": http://i.imgur.com/wEmUT5R.jpg

The concept here is that once a task in a Long List "stands out" I have to decide using my own intuition whether it is "urgent enough" to do. If it is, I do it. If not, then it probably is a "time wasting task" and I should choose another one. I find that this algorithm has cut down my need to play games, watch vids, read fiction, and other time wasting things, and thus the time I spent in doing more important things have gone up. As an added bonus, it tells me when I needed to rest by only having leisurely tasks "standing out" after I have gone through the whole list.

I have a feeling that using this algorithm with Simple Scanning will make that system the most powerful system to date. As of right now though I am having way too much fun using Task Tracking to test it.