Get Everything Done

I didn’t see a place to report back, so, here it is.

Me, I completely and utterly failed in every way. There are many reasons, including trying too much, getting distracted by Nir Iyal’s Indistractible, getting hit hard by malaise. The upshot is not only did I fail to follow my rules, I have embarked on a massive project of reinventing my operating system, which is quite the opposite of the objective of the Challenge.

My aim for a new OS is an adaptive goal-directed process of continuous and tracked improvement.

I think the book is good but it is challenging. In many ways, not excluding that Nir is an avowed fan of time boxing and scheduling, which puts a question of how to apply some of his ideas without scheduling everything.

GIRKIR does not encompass my thoughts. Where I'm at now I am not at all interested in maintenance mode operation, which is what is implied by "keep it right", or even just the word "right". Also the process of GIRKIR does not include the deeper thinking I believe I need, and does not track progress. I'm thinking like writing a story through my activities. (Washing dishes is an activity, but not interesting to the story. Making specific progress on a project is part of the story.) There is a similarity nevertheless: I think about covering all aspects of life, which GIRKIR does.

I have a scheme in mind, but it doesn't really look like anything I've seen before.

If it's called "Get Running, Stay Running", that seems a fine concept, but I do not find the GIRKIR system as proposed attractive to me. Possibly something similar, but I'd need to wrap my mind around what specifically seems right/wrong.

I know I can put thinking things and writing things in a list, but the process I'm imagining doesn't involve these things as list items but as part of this integral process. In any event, it's not sure what I come up with will work, but it won't be as simple as a list processing system.

My focus is on the information I'm trying to capture, and that information is not structured as a list. If I happen to run through a list as a process to build this, okay, but that's not the point.

It occurs to me that what I'm contemplating is theoretically impossible. A radical shift of habits from one of "do what stands out" to planning everything and following the plan (as they stand out). It's not supposed to be possible to make such drastic changes. Yet I don't see any specific reason that will stop me, so I persist. I hope a number of factors present in my life make this possible, and I expect to put this into practice gradually so it all works out.

A blog post! Wow. If it works, it will take a long while to prove it. My aim is to be able to say in 6 months exactly how my life has improved, and the steps I took to get there. More important than that report, my aim for the process is that It helps me move forward such that the content of my progress report would satisfy me.

So come back in 6 months?

Also, I am not sure I could successfully communicate the soft aspects of my thinking clesrly and briefly. Also a good portion of it seems to depend on the tools I'm using. I can't imagine successfully pulling it offf using paper or with a basic text editor or a spreadsheet. It feels like nothing short of a small book would convey the process! Not that I have any intent to write books. But maybe things will simplify. I still am unclear on a lot of what I'm attempting to pull together.

Darren Hardy, episode 583, https://darrenhardy.com/darrendaily-on-demand

Talks about exactly what I'm talking about. Establishing commitments and following through with the help of keeping things visible. His method may be different, but the substance is the same.

I am astonished to report after one week with this new system, that not only is it working, it is responsible for enabling what is easily the most productive week I've ever had in my life!

It has been a very hard week of work, but satisfying, and I don't take fore granted that the next week will work the same. The process is still very sketchy, it takes a lot of work to maintain, I can't explain it exactly, and I'm spending time today to try to work details out for the coming week.

The second week was less than the first, still went pretty well. It was not a question of weeding. This is not a system of generating more and more tasks in the way task systems generally are. Perhaps I was trying to do too much at once, but I don't think it was too much; it was too "at once". If I had merely spaced out the planning across time, it likely would have worked better.

The other cause of difficulty was just mechanical. I was experimenting with ways of organizing my information, and it just wasn't clicking. I think the third week will be better again.

Week 3: feeling better about all, though I didn’t follow through on everything I anticipated. Obvious culprit is the change of scene: working at the office instead of home is a major disruption of my routine.

My attempt at a remedy: introducing a process like AF2x2 http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2020/12/14/another-experiment.html

Albeit with major differences. What is the same: 2 lists. Switch lists after every action taken. What is different: I will run the first list in forward mode and only the second reversed. Also there is structure to these items. Also there is a putting tasks away back to the first list that isn’t in Mark’s system.

So really what’s the same is mainly the ping pong between lists. The motivation here is to have a more dynamic activation process instead of a DIT style that I was doing.

hm. after a day of trying that. Seems to me The Bounce accomplishes pretty much the same thing in this context without all the jumping.