Get Everything Done

I have immersed myself for several days in understanding as best I can the DIT structures of closed will do lists, closed backlogs, and balancing commitments/time.

I have had great success at creating some days with closed "will do" lists. As great as advertised. Makes a lot of sense. I now see the layer of the world that is the thought behind closed and open lists. For example, to the right of our kitchen sink maps to the closed list...we rinse and stack our dishes through the day, then unload the dishwash/reload it after dinner. That side of the sink is a "closed list" with specific characterstics. The left hand side of our sink, on the other hand is an "open list" area...kind of a dumping ground for random toys, papers, an interesting stick that one of the boys found, keys, etc...there is no closed loop nature to it, other than once a day, I will get out the coffee prep stuff to do a thermos full of pour-over coffee, and if needed, shove the piles of stuff out of the way.

This explains the general sense of frustration I have for the left hand side of the sink, and the comfortableness I have with the right hand side of the sink...one has definition, and the other has none, even though at any given time, the right hand side might have more stuff on it...but it is dishes collecting to be processed, not a dumping ground for anything.

I am now doing my weekly planning, which up until now has been a merger of GTD weekly meeting, Scrum sprint planning, and a system of my own that I call Fractal that maps to dos to the calendar, and creates margin in the system. I am planning on taking the concept of a closed backlog, and applying it to the week, so that by the end of this planning session, I will have a closed will do list for the week. This works well for me, since my weeks are quite predictable now, as opposed to my past life when I was a PM.

I am not yet doing any sorting of my commitments, I am simply becoming more and more aware of them, what they actually are, what they are not (what I am not actually committed to, even if I "feel" like I should be)...and will do some sorting at the level of commitments to prep for the next 12 week year which starts June 1.