Get Everything Done

I know what I would use, but that doesn't mean it is what you should use. A lot of it also depends on your workload and what that looks like in terms of the type of work. Here's a general principle that I focus on at least when I'm thinking about this stuff: what is the largest reliable unit of time in which you can go without having to be responsive to others? That is, what is the largest continual chunk of time you can consistently reserve for yourself to be without distractions?

My goal would be to maximize this chunk size. Obviously, things won't be perfect, but I prefer to think about designing my systems to maximize the amount of focused time I can have on the things that are of the highest impact for my work, which means trying to figure out how far I can push my schedule to ensure that I don't receive or can shut down/queue any potential interruptions rather than having to deal with them right away. Getting this chunk of time as large as possible can touch on practically all of your systems.

My personal view is that getting this to the point where you can pretty much go an entire day without having to shift your task list is probably ideal. This is very similar to the ideas found in Do It Tomorrow and other systems, such as Personal Kanban. It's all about cycle time and the like.

Of course, I happen to agree with James Clear that the single most powerful technique that I have ever found is "Do the most important thing first thing each day." I scale this up by using the Ivy Lee method, and it's the one that I've found most consistently effective. That's the way I would do things, but how well that will work will very much depend on how well you can manage the environment around you, as well as having a good idea of how to define "important".

I generally operate these days around the assumption that nothing is allowed to derail a day, but it can change what I do the next day provided that I have cleared space based on productivity today. This discounts *true* emergencies, but I make it a point not to allow false emergencies to be rewarded, even if that can sometimes be painful. And of course, it's never a perfect setup, but it means that I can pretty much go through the whole day and always have an answer to "what is the next best thing I should do right now?" without ever having to actually think or look at a long set of lists.

If your response/cycle time has to be shorter, then a lot of Mark's systems are designed around a much shorter task time and cycle time, which might suit your preferred method of working better.

I had a big, long discussion about state transitions and understanding how it's all the same and all you have to do is figure out how often and when you want to switch between Clarifying, Capturing, and Engaging with work, but then I realized it could be much simpler. It's easy to capture everything down. After you do that, you just have to figure out which things you want to put into daily habits/checklists/routines that you will do in a specific order, each day, the same way, all the time, and which things are going to be the things represent unique tasks or non-recurring stuff that you aren't going to make a routine. Then you just have to ask yourself, if you could only pick one thing from among these things on this list to do, and nothing else got done the rest of the day, what would you pick? Then assume this one thing is done and repeat the process. That's how you figure out what is important. That could be a little loose end that needs to be tied up, and it could be something big.

Now, all you have to do is decide how often and when you want to do that process throughout the day. For me, I basically repeat that process six times at one point in the evening to set up my next day (that's the core of Ivy Lee's method). For FVP, you are doing this when you stop doing what you were doing, and you essentially have an algorithm for arriving at this question. Pretty much all of Mark's long list systems are just different ways of arriving at this question with a different set of inputs and at different frequencies throughout the day, though most of them always trigger when you are done working on something you were doing, and the then either fall into the kind that stack up choices (FV, Next Hour, FVP) and those that pick a single thing at a time (AF, Simple Scanning).

There's really not much more to it, at its heart.

I don't think it's a dichotomy. To me, it's all the same. It's just a matter of specific contexts that you want to apply for things, and what things fit where. Some people like a very stark contrast in different types of tasks (90 minute blocks and list churning), but that's not the only way to cut the cake.

Specifically, you can divide a larger task up based on how much time you work on it at a time, or based on individual sub-tasks with specifically defined outcomes. Mark's systems allow for both strategies to be used simultaneously, and you can use your intuition on which strategy to use. Since I've found consistently that working in a defined block of time is the worst way for me to work, I focus almost entirely on breaking tasks down into subtasks with defined outcomes.

So, let's say that some task or goal is obviously too big for me to complete within a given window I care about (often that's a 3 - 6 hour window of focused time). It might even get on to my list as something I need to do. Well, if I'm running an Ivy Lee list and I get to that item, I should "complete" that task before I move on, but that task could take days or weeks to complete. Obviously, that won't work. In that case, I could take two different approaches. I could say, well, I'll just work on it for some time each day until it is done. I don't find that this works well for me at all. Instead, I do the second approach, which is that I work on the task until I have fully clarified and understood what I am doing well enough that I can break the task down into some set of smaller parts that need to be handled, and that can be done independently. At that point, those tasks go into my capture system as separate tasks, and I can consider that larger task done. Then I can continue on with my list. Often I will work for some time on the idea to get as clarified as I can within a given amount of time that feels good as well.

This means that working on a given big outcome will get broken progressively down into smaller and smaller outcomes as I continue to work on it until I get to the point where the outcomes can be accomplished within the timeframe of a day or less, at which point I usually just finish them outright.

I find that doing it this way gives me constant senses of accomplishment, and helps me to manage taking on big goals (that is, break it down into small goals). That's a really common strategy. But some people much prefer the other way, to work a little bit at a time on a given thing, with the boundaries between sub-tasks left more nebulous. Even then, some people working a little bit at a time on a thing can get a sense of burnout if the goal is very larger, which is where having small daily goals can help (authors who use word counts are examples of this).

So, in the end, to me, I don't separate these things into lots of different categories. To me, they are all just tasks on my daily list. I just work with them, and sometimes that means breaking them down, and sometimes that means just doing them, but at least in the system they are all the same thing, and I don't use other categorizations, such as making one of them my "Current Inititative" or saving some tasks for my "Deep Work sessions" or large blocks of times. Those are all strategies that others find helpful, so if they help, then go for that, but they aren't strictly necessary either.

With respect to the calendar, I mostly just have a calendar of my appointments and then I have a list for each month that gets carried into my "feeder list" when the new month rolls around. This means I can defer some tasks that aren't ready to be done yet to another month. Other than that, pretty much everything else is just going into the capture/feeder list or into my main lists/routines. Thus, to me, I don't separate out this kind of stuff. I agree with Mark that "it's all important at some point" or that general sentiment.

Keep in mind that planning in the sense of setting and intention to do something in the future is always easy. It's one of the ways your mind can offload burdens, because the future is always discounted. It's no surprise that you find planning 90 minute blocks easy, but doing them difficult. It's worth spending significant amounts of your energy on solving the problem of doing something, rather than spending too much energy on improving planning, IMO, because I've always found the doing part the hardest. So, IMO, it's better energy spent if you focus on getting better at taking action on a thing rather than getting better at planning when that thing should be done.

A great protocol for 90 minute work blocks I've seen is from the Focus and Action group, which basically suggests:

1. Clear out your environment.
2. Set the goal and why it's important to you.
3. Set a timer.
4. Let yourself either do your task/goal or be bored and do nothing, but don't do anything other than that.

I find that last part really a key insight. Giving yourself permission to do nothing inside of a 90 minute block is a powerful release, and it can help drive your mind towards the task in ways that other techniques don't.

Mark:

<<But I didn't think of specifying that "nothing except work" meant that you could do nothing or you could work.>>

The biggest challenge I've found with something like this is making sure that you have set up your environment to be suitably non-stimulating that you can actually follow through on the "be bored" part. It's easy to whittle away at your time doing "nothing" when in fact you've let yourself be engaged with all manner of daydreaming or stimulating observation of the world around you, such as looking out at the sun and sky, or watching birds, or even just admiring some trinket that you kept on a shelf in reach of your space. The protocol above insists that you make your environment as non-stimulating as possible so that the boredom can actually help feed into your task that you are trying to focus on. Most people have environments that are more stimulating than that, which could undermine the effectiveness of the technique.