Get Everything Done

Working with GIRKIR, I've been challenged a bit regarding what should be kept into a routine and left off the list as something that I just do at a given point in my day and what things I should keep on the list. Mark has said that things he does more or less automatically aren't on the list.

I've done some research into the history of the discussions on this and I think I'm understanding the advice correctly, but I have a set of things that I think *ideally* form a morning routine for me, say, the equivalent of Spirit, Mind, Body tasks that I would do when I wake up in the morning, as well as having some Tea. I also have a set of things that I like to do in the evening when I am done with work.

I had started with having all of these tasks on my GIRKIR list, but if I'm understanding it correctly, it might be better to simply remove my three morning routine tasks (or even a single checklist task called "Morning Routine") from the list entirely. This would mean I'm not jumping through the list to get to those tasks. I just don't start working my list until I'm done with my morning tasks. Does this seem like a good idea or not? They are not time specific except that they are relatively time specific, in that every day I want to get these three things done before anything else.

The problem is that I often get distracted in the morning by other things, and so the thought of putting them on my list was to help keep them in focus and get me into my list sooner, but I wonder whether this is the right way to think about things?

For things that I do at the end of the day, I'm not putting them on a routine, but I'm just letting myself pass over them during the day in the list if I don't feel that the time is right. This seems to work just fine for me right now. I think that this somehow works better for me in the evening because I don't feel like I'm "hunting" for a specific item like I do with the morning items, but merely rejecting the odd item here and there when I'm running my list during the day.

Of course, as Mark points out, routines help a lot, but I'm not sure what the right guiding principle is for maximizing discretionary time while also taking advantage of routines, because I still don't feel that I have a good connection to whether something should or should not be done at the same time each day, since nothing is done at the same time each day for me right now, and things are only relatively ordered, not absolutely time-specific, at their most scheduled.

Mark:

I know that you've said to keep specific time schedules to a minimum and maximize your use of discretionary time, as well as your ideas around using routines to improve your intuition. However, a part of me feels like it would be even better if a system could be used that allowed for the effective handling of morning routines as well as smoothly transitioning into more free form elements. That is, a system that helped to streamline a set of things that you often do in the morning and evening. The benefit here would be for those who want to have some level of routine around these periods, but who often struggle in the "transition" where the transition tends to cause aimless wandering or lots of distraction.

I guess I sort of want to be able to get "in system" as quickly as possible, as if I'm out of system, then it's a lot easier for me to start wandering aimlessly. I could have checklists for the morning and evening and run those, but then that's yet another thing to keep that, to me, increases the burden of the system, where I'm hoping to streamline it.

It seems to me that some systems are more amenable than others to handling batched tasks that you want to do before or after some other set of tasks on a daily or weekly basis, but which are not inherently time specific.

Maybe I focus on this because for me, I don't have a lot of tasks, but rather, it's the getting from one task to another in a good order, and without distraction, that's the hard part.