Get Everything Done

A short while ago I run out of steam using 5/2, which I had used to save me from the shattered remains a GTDesque system of my own doing had caused in my work-life.

I am a fan of the no list method and similar things that work with very short jottings and blockings. But, repeatedly I've found that Mark's Long List systems as well as GTD help me a lot with the catch-all feature. I don't need the Library of Congress, but having all the odd ends together in a list helps me to focus. I was happy to ditch this attitude when No List came out, but I came back to that. You can get fancy and call it "mind like water", but, whatever, this thing works for me.

Despite using 5/2 I knew I needed more for completeness and punctual as if done just for me Mark started his re-visit of Autofocus 1.

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2021/5/19/latest-on-autofocus-revisit.html

Even a while further back we had the discussion of the someday/maybe list. I remembered that when AF1 came out, I deemed the highlighted list of dismissed tasks the someday/maybe that works. I spoke to myself about that and we agreed that we wanted to have one of those. So we started a new list with AF1.

This worked very well and I reviewed the dismissed tasks once per week, scheduled in the calendar, which also turned out to be a good choice.

I did not suffer the two alleged main shortcomings of AF1: a) not being flexible enough to react to new and pressing tasks and b) de-emphasizing deep work. On a very few days I just worked on 2-3 deep work tasks from the list. On most days I would travel the list fast enough to catch any urgent items soon enough.

Like Mark states in his blog post I also got a lot done, all sorts of things really. Resistance was non-existent and unpleasant tasks got unstuck without exceptions. All happened in that calm and relaxed manner that is so typical for AF1. My daily average for additionally completed tasks off-list was around two to three. The points system enabled me to play games for short periods.

All this was good, but today we agreed again to switch to FV. (We will not start a new list.)

The reason for that is, that we drank Mark's cool-aid of the principle of high productivity through routines. We had very good experiences with that and 5/2, FVP and SiSc.

But with AF1 the whole system is set up against that. You battle the current page, which is powerfully leveraging the Closed List and this is a sort of Halving of those tasks on that page. This driving dynamic is completely agnostic to the established routines.

In theory the clumping of the list would help here, but too often it was to slow or a key routine task finds itself singled out on another page. I found the draw of established routines to be the single most factor that pulled me off-list.

All these thoughts together want me to have a catch-all Long List with the routine-building prowes off a No List, without sacrificing elegance (which comes through simplicity). Less is less.

This made me think of Mark's experiment with making No Lists systematic etc

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/4/24/systematic-next-hour.html

From that perspective I needed a systematic system that let's me focus on routine-building. The Next Hour is absolutely perfect for building routines. Making it systematic adds the "mind like water" factor to it and means, as per blog post above to use FV.

I'll add one additional rule to it: when deleting a task I have the option of dismissing it instead, which means it gets highlighted ala AF1 and reviewed on my weekly scheduled review.