Get Everything Done

So, I've been feeling a little resistance to GIRKIR lately, though I've enjoyed working the system and learning about it. Before I just abandon ship, I'd like to try to stick it out for the challenge, but I'd like some feedback on my overall issues.

Firstly, there's a lot of appeal to me with a long list system, mostly encapsulated by this post:

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/10/9/thoughts-on-the-long-list-making-everything-easy.html

The idea of having a relaxed, flowing process with low tension through my work is *very* appealing to me.

However, coming from Personal Kanban, and then working a 5/2 no list, and finally playing with GIRKIR and going through the SoPP book, I'm finding myself somewhat resistant. The proper term is actually better termed as "annoyed" more than anything. As Mark has previously noted, I think I have to admit that I might be a hyper-organized and extremely "pro-active" sort of person. Using 5/2 was okay for me, but I often found that I simply couldn't follow the rule to go through each item and work on it little and often, because I was rather strongly intuitively driving towards something else on the list, and not actioning that item just because something else happened to come before it in the list was a bit of a point of contention. Additionally, I never quite felt "low tension" with the no list because I never felt like I had good clarity over the "totality" of my work, in that I would tend to hard focus in on only some things, and neglect other things. I didn't feel like I was hitting a good balance. So, this gave me the following issues with 5/2:

* Feeling strong resistance to actioning items in order, but strong drive to action items in a different order than what is written down
* Limited total clarity on my commitments and work

Overall, it generally felt like there was too much overhead in the system that didn't feel "helpful."

Now, starting GIRKIR and having run it for a while, it has taken a bit of time for the list to mature and to balance itself, as well as for me to begin to identify the causes of resistance and patterns. One issue has been lack of action on some items, which I've been able to identify reasonably well, and have been able to remedy most of those issues or at least identify what is causing the problem and begin implementing fixes. In one case, my main work wasn't getting actioned because I wasn't writing the right thing down in my list, but once I put the right thing down (a little more specific, concrete, and actionable) resistance disappeared and action was taken.

However, even if all my remedies work, I'm finding an inherent resistance to the system, a sort of frustration, driven by a feeling that the system is getting in the way of my getting things done, rather than facilitating it. There are two main aspects to this:

* I'm finding that the list layout doesn't let me "monitor" or become more aware of how I'm spending my time. I feel like I'm not getting sufficient real time feedback on my day and information on its progress such that I'm able to adapt. I feel somewhat "blind" because working the list tends to draw my attention away from my weekly calendar spread that would otherwise contain a journaling record of my time spent. I feel like the overall format of the GIRKIR list is resulting in less visual clarity of the state of my life in the moment, taking me out of the present.

* Secondly, I'm finding the same issue I was having with 5/2 in terms of actioning procedures. I'm finding that scanning the list is extremely frustrating. I have only a tiny number of items on my list, and I've controlled the intake of new items so that those new items just don't get onto the list in any way that will cause the list to grow large. Combined with this, I have what I think is perhaps an above average grasp of the "total state of my projects", meaning that at any given time, I am pretty clear on what the state of each of my areas of focus are, and what needs doing on each of them. In this respect, one benefit of scanning the list, to help get a feel for my work, is a moot point. That leaves the scanning primarily valuable as a means to help me take action on items and decide what to do through "standing out." However, I'm finding that whenever I begin the process of scanning, I almost always know exactly what I'm going to land on and action before I ever finish scanning, to the point that I pretty much don't need to scan at all to know what I want to do. I usually feel a very strong sense of what I want to be doing, and I've found that scanning the list usually results only in diffusing that sense of intuition about what I want to do, not actually enhancing it. The only exception to this is the small one off task that sometimes slips my mind in the moment and that I might remember about while scanning, but I rarely have that happen, and more often than not I'm still unable to action it.

The end result is that I'm largely scanning for no reason and to no end, since I already have a strong sense of standing out on my list and know in advance what I want to action, and the various items only obfuscates the miscellaneous hidden items that I might want to be reminded of across multiple pages instead of having them all on a single page to review. Except for a few occasional items, I pretty much end up with my entire list memorized and scanned in my head before I even get to the physical scanning. Compared to the somewhat tight representation in my head, I find that the representation on the page just feels very awkward to go through and I feel like I'm having to do all sorts of work to make it through the list, none of which changes my mind about what I want to do.

This means, in short, that the whole process of scanning the list ends up feeling like a big, inefficient waste of time. The crossing out and re-entering and all of that just feels like needless busywork getting in the way of taking action. I end up feeling that the visual representation of my potential work on the page is just messy and lacking in structure and order. I feel this strongly enough to have to admit to myself that I'm probably triggering some sort of hyper-organization in myself.

So, I'm feeling like both a long list and no-list system like 5/2 are both sort of "missing the boat" for me and a little frustrating because I don't really like the representation, clarity, organization, or the work involved in running them. They both feel way too heavyweight while not transmitting the right visual signals cleanly enough for me.

So, I've been thinking about what to do instead, and here's what I have. The main pattern emerging in working GIRKIR is a strong sense of the order in which things should be done, and a certain structure to doing certain work. Lots of desirable routines, or items to remember to handle for a given type of work. So, instead of working a list, I'm thinking that I'd be better off just switching to working almost 100% off of checklists, with a very small Misc. list of items that I need to do that fall completely outside of normal ranges and that aren't scheduled.

The idea here is to reduce or eliminate as much overhead as possible in the system, and lean really heavily into the ideas of questioning, pruning commitments, systems thinking, and intuitive actioning. Each authorized commitment can be associated or identified with a specific set of routines that are encoded as a set of checklists. This will be all-encompassing for my work and personal realms. I think work primarily from a weekly paper calendar layout, with a "check list" on the left side, and one column for each day of the week. I leave the days mostly blank except for scheduled items and reminders.

I then take intuitive action via questioning using the "true no list" method of writing down the next thing you intend to do and then doing it. I write it down in the day's column at the time I start the work, which gives me a visual/spatial record of my work done, instead of the less spatially arranged layout of a no-list or long list system. This gives me a very good progress-meter like monitoring system for seeing how my day is progressing, and introduces more clarity and feedback about my time limits and commitments in a real time fashion, while still allowing me to intuitively adjust my life.

In the check list column of the planner goes all my routines and check lists, with a small area at the bottom available for dynamically adding to my "misc" commitments, which are all almost entirely going to be administrative issues relating to family or business. All other requirements can easily be recorded and saved in project specific records, that I will rarely need to look at because I pretty much already know the next action for each projects/commitment.

The process of actioning now becomes a matter of scanning my checklists and intuitively taking action, and marking down my actions in a true no list fashion, rather than using a "live" to do list. The checklists are all pre-built routines and micro-routines that are a part of my life, with only a tiny portion of buffer for things that are fully outside of normal routines (I have very little of that stuff that is truly outside of the realm of predictable).

I think that in actually working this system, it has the ability to be adapted on a weekly basis as commitments change, or even mid-week if necessary, while having almost zero-overhead to work the system while using it during the day. It allows me to leverage a variety of questions with very little overhead. I can also see everything at a glance, without the need to page through various lists of mostly dead items (crossed out items).

The benefits here, as far as I can see is that I will always have the ability to produce the visual reminders for possibilities of action that a long list would provide, through my check list on the side, so that I don't have to keep that information in my brain. However, I won't have to have the overhead of scanning and working a long list system in order to visualize my possible range of actions. In my mind, this promises to deliver the comprehensiveness of a long list system while giving me the fast, reactive, dynamic elements of a no-list system, and giving me none of the "ordering constraint" annoyance that I get with either system.

The fact that this system is A) attractive to me and B) actually seems like it might work better than a long list or no-list system suggests a deep underlying hyper-organization that I might not have been willing to admit to before, as well as a set of internally, subconsciously desired routines that are coming to light and manifesting as resistance to running lists that are "out of order with respect to my desired routines".

In my mind, the entire day is still driven by "standing out" and intuition about what I should be doing now, but scaffolded by a very carefully curated selection of options and possibilities that are refined into routines that are relatively precisely described via checklists. I think the important thing to me is the ability to still choose to do what I want to do in the order I want to do them without worrying about neglecting an area of my life, because I have visual tabs on all my responsibilities.

Now, is this all wishful thinking? What are some pitfalls I'll need to watch out for? And maybe even more important, am I just overreacting to GIRKIR and missing a big point that I should maybe work on before dropping GIRKIR and switching to a system like the one outlined above?

Yep, at the core of this is the application of a "true no list" or what amounts of a 1 item no-list system, as you pointed out in our previous discussions regarding 5/2.

However, both 5/2 and this system on its own aren't sufficiently comprehensive, which is one of the real values of a long list, because it lets you see possibility visually rather than relying on your mind to generate them constantly. I found that I was very focused with 5/2, but I didn't "trigger" on things that mattered to me but that weren't "pressing" in the same way as my bigger stressors with sufficient regularity to keep them up to date. In other words, it was simply too easy to get hyper focused on one thing without being appropriately balanced, and the work to stay balanced required too much mental energy the whole time.

So, while the speed and reactiveness of these no-list systems was really good, and I found them more intuitive than a long list system, I still want something to reduce the mental burden required to generate possibilities all the time.

My proposed solution to this is the utilization of checklists, since I can readily encode my "life" into checklists that are sufficiently high resolution to ensure that I'm taking care of business.

The benefits here are that the checklists are always in a format to be read, and don't require me to scan long lists. They're faster than a long list, but I think they'll retain the same comprehensiveness.

But, while this seems attractive to me, I'm really just trying to see whether I'm missing something about GIRKIR or long list systems in my analysis (that they are too much overhead, despite provide comprehensiveness) before I abandon my GIRKIR system in favor of something like this. After all, this is supposed to be a Lenten challenge! :-) I'm wondering if there is something I'm missing or misusing in the system and whether maybe just sticking with GIRKIR and making some tweaks wouldn't be better.

Actually, the more I think about it the more I think that what I'm contemplating is really more of a long list system than a "no list" system. I'm using the no list method of recording actions taken (write down what you are going to do and then do it), but I'm not deriving those actions from the top of my head. Instead, those actions are being taken from, in essence a statically structured list of tasks that are arranged and grouped according to the ordering that I find most appealing/desirable. There's room to add to this list, but that happens so infrequently that this might as well be a static list that is weeded and adjusted mostly on weekly/monthly intervals.

In such a list, I'd still be using scanning and standing out to take action on those items, so I'm still essentially "working" from a list. The main difference is that I'm recording my actions taken in a weekly planner that runs parallel to the list instead of crossing items out, which has the effect of keeping the list written in the same basic order that I initially wrote it in.

Because of the restriction that the list must fit on my planner, it also restricts the total number of items on the list at any given time. It also greatly speeds up scanning since the scanning is always a single column of a relatively few number of options. This means that there's really very little difference in effect between simple scanning and a scan that always starts from the top.

I think my main resistance right now to the GIRKIR long list is that the items don't end up in a good "clumping" order for me, and that I don't like scanning through crossed out items (which I do too often), and I don't like that I can't see everything at once, including my time already spent in the day.

So, maybe it's more correct to say that I'm trying to change the long list more by changing how I annotate and record it than anything else?

Okay, I have been playing around a bit and I think I'm going to continue to work with GIRKIR a little bit more and see if I can tweak a few other things before I abandon it. Like Seraphim mentioned, I'm a bit concerned about a reduction in flexibility. I'm going to try a little variation of recording/journaling in the form of a "to done list" next to my weekly time log to see if that helps bump my awareness and motivation up a little bit, while still running GIRKIR as the main "operating system." I think I also need to focus in taking more advantage of the back that GIRKIR is a free form list, and play with being more precise and concrete with my tasks.

Aaron, I feel your pain :) and have bounced from long list to no-list and everywhere in between over these past 12 years or so (whenever Lifehacker published their first article on AF.)

My solution since the advent of Lent has been to work off of a spreadsheet that lets me hide a long list and do a no list (saving unfinished tasks) and allows me to work the long list in a variety of ways (fvp and the bounce as my favorites). It also allows me to time block and schedule, and it links to checklists I have set up for routine work. I then decide in the morning (subject to revision later in the day) which system I will use.

Still not ideal, but I like the variety of methods without losing my data.

Mark, thanks for the suggestion of nested checklists. Do you have any sense of the advantages and disadvantages long term of running a checklist based system versus a long list based system?

Just recording my thoughts here a little bit.

I think my annoyance with GIRKIR and resistance as I've been thinking about it has more to do with a failed sense of progress than it does with the disorder of the list. That is, I think the real issue with the list that is getting me is a lack of *novelty*. Being driven strongly by novelty and order, my tasks on the list weren't doing enough to give me a sense of novelty, and thus some tasks that felt "old and tired" were just languishing there in favor of tasks that promised more novelty.

I think I need a combination of novelty and the opportunity to put those novel things into order. Without one or the other, I start to stagnate. This means that I don't think the checklist option is going to work because it will result in high order, but low novelty, which will be as bad as novelty without order. I need something that incentivizes progress on "high leverage" activities that gives me a sense of progress and novelty, but driven by the construction of "visual order." I think static order doesn't do it for me, but I am motivated by the opportunity to take something that is without the appropriate order and take action to make it more orderly.

This is probably why I like recording my tasks on a timeline but I don't like pre-planning them on the timeline, because then its too orderly ahead of time, whereas the journaling of my time spent affords me the opportunity to create order from chaos. But just having this timeline only highlights the time I'm spending on various things, and it has a tendency to emphasize recurring patterns too much, so I don't get a sense of progress, but just circularity.

I think the simple tweak of adding a "done" list to my weekly time log that I fill out as I complete finite, independent, demonstrable products of value combined with framing my main work tasks as more concrete, novel tasks instead of recurring "patterns" of "Project X" or "Project Y" might be enough to get rid of the resistance I'm feeling with GIRKIR, as I'll have that novelty, but I'll also get a stronger sense of progress through watching my "done" list grow throughout the week. I'll be motivated to make that list grow, but I won't feel "bad" if I don't get "everything done" because there was never a weekly list of things that I projected I would be able to get done. This adds a bit more signaling to my intuition and some more feedback without interfering with intuitive actioning of my list, I think.

That may be all I need to make this work better for me. I also like the nice segregation of my "monitoring/awareness" in the weekly planner and the "ideation/actioning" in the separate GIRKIR list. I take action in one, and am able to reflect and refine my intuition in the other.

Let's see how this goes!

I don't mean this to be a cheeky observation, but I'm reminded from this discussion about similar discourses I've participated in on other forums regarding the right diet, the right exercise, the right information management system, the right this or that.

As Mark has often said, what's right is what's right for you. Perhaps it's as simple as what Aaron is discovering in his deep dive: this aspect of that system is what works for me, this aspect doesn't. That's a big value of committing to a specific task-management method for the Lenten challenge rather than being a "value vampire" and simply cherry-picking what you like and ignoring what you don't; you do have to confront what works for you and what doesn't.

For myself -- I find that in dieting and task management, I have been blessed with strategies and techniques that I can pull out and use based on how I'm feeling or how busy/relaxed my environment is and can still see results.

As Mark shared in one of his earlier blog posts, things got so bad for him at one time all he could use was The Next Hour but it was enough. Sticking with a single system when our environments, our moods/physical condition, and Life throw up so many variables -- it seems like a futile mission. Having alternative systems in our toolkits for times like that is SO COOL; I wonder sometimes how normal people get by without them.