Get Everything Done

Having spent some time playing around with various long and no-list systems, there's one thing that I still can't seem to "address" through Mark's systems, and I'm wondering if someone has spent some time on this.

It seems to me that Mark's systems are very much geared to helping you take lots of little action on many tasks, or at least, by default they seem optimized for this. Assuming that each task is somehow "important" meaning that it's something that you not only want to get done, but is also good for you in some longer sense, and that the task for routine tasks has a clear "done" point, then this choice of optimization seems to work well. For example, while it may be far away, there is usually at least a theoretical point at which email is "done". Some people might not consider Email an important task, but it's clearly very important to have that in order for many people. So, it's a routine task that is important to do, but might not be considered important in a "big project" sense, yet still has a definable stopping point at which you can say "I'm done" even if you never stop doing the task.

However, I don't currently understand how Mark's systems are able to cope with tasks that are the exact opposite of these tasks. These are tasks which you want to do, that are valuable to do, but only in highly limited quantities, but that are inherently addictive at a fundamental brain level. That is, these are tasks that inherently make you want to *keep* doing them. Procrastinating on them is hard, but doing them is easy. They train your brain inherently by the way they are designed to make you want to keep doing them, so they will *always* stand out, or nearly always. There is no end to them, so you can never be done with them.

These sorts of tasks are addictive, accessible, easy to do, fun, and are always able to be done, meaning that they are always available. However, the key here is that they are also tasks that are, in some ways, not something you want to remove from your life completely. They aren't tied to a specific schedule, and they aren't things you want to stop doing.

The trick with such tasks is that a system designed to handle them should ensure that you take action on such tasks just when it is right, and in just the right amount, but without ever doing more of that task than you should. That is, the problem is about limiting the amount of time you spend with that task.

It seems to me that in the presence of such tasks, Mark's systems don't seem to have a clear solution of how to deal with them. Yet, in some ways, I think these tasks are the real *gremlins* of modern time management. I don't have trouble procrastinating on doing my main tasks, at least not in the traditional sense, but I do have trouble *not* doing too much of these addictive tasks. I've also found that things like timeboxing or trying to time limit these tasks just doesn't seem to work very well. There's just too little incentive in the moment to stop when the timer says you should stop.

So, how does a system built on Standing Out and Little and Often manage to cope with tasks that are designed to stand out to you and designed to make you always feel like doing more of it when you start doing the task? They don't seem to address these sorts of tasks. Taking them out of the system seems, in some way, to be a defeat of the system (it can't cope with these things that are discretionary tasks done in discretionary time that you want to do but don't want to do too much of). And taking them out of the system, if you could then somehow manage them well out of the system would almost make the existing system moot, since the whole reason you need a time management system in the first place (at least for some people) is to manage these sorts of tasks.

For people like that, if you get these tasks under control, then almost everything else just falls into place easily. But how do you do that?

I'd love to hear people's thoughts on how the long list Standing Out systems are able to cope with this or not. In my experience, I have to admit that I don't think they have quite hit the right balance for me personally, but I'd love to know what other people do to manage them within a system like AF or FVP. If I just don't do them, then I find zero issue with taking action on any of the things that I should do otherwise, such as my big projects and the like, and I basically don't need a time management system at all to handle all of that, but the moment I start feel the pressure and need/want to relax with some of these leisure tasks, everything goes off the rails.

These sorts of tasks would be things like TV, books, social media, YouTube, Netflix, social visits, long Skype/Zoom calls, forums, or the like. These are never-ending tasks that will almost always stand out more than something else if the system allows you to say, "Well, I'll just do a little of this first."