Get Everything Done

I've recently come across Mark's stuff and appreciate the practical, experimental, and algorithmic nature of his approaches, as well as what seems like a small but intelligent community discussing his ideas and related topics. I just finished reading Get Everything Done today and I've got the rest of his books coming in the mail, and am gradually going about exploring the contents of this website.

As I take in, process, and implement this material, it would help me to have a bigger picture view of things, particularly given the variety of what is on offer and how (I presume) there must be a rhyme and reason for how things have evolved the way they did. Perhaps some of the other books will touch on this, but those are spaced out between a period of 2000 - 2015 so would at best provide a partial and outdated view.

I am also aware of the "TM Systems" post on this website, but this is just a collection of different systems, not a synopsis that places their evolution and interrelationship into an overarching context that would help to frame and contextualize all of them as aspects of one wider ongoing endeavor.

For instance, my main personal takeaways from Get Everything Done are:
- existing attention management systems like prioritizing, do it now, etc. are flawed because X Y Z.
- the round robin task management approach is a simple way to manage tasks that addresses the main weaknesses of other approaches.
- alternatively, if one is ready to work in a less formulaic way, a good principle is to always work on what feels highest resistance first.
- more generally, one must develop the ability to act on decision rather than impulse. this can be developed by gradually building one's capacity to decide what one will do tomorrow, and then do it.
- the above is all contingent on first cutting down on commitments enough that one has sufficient resources to address all of one's tasks and projects over time.

These all sound like solid principles to try out for framing and implementing task management, and I'm planning on doing so for the next little while. But the profusion of different systems that seems to have popped up over time, including some with approaches that are almost opposite in spirit (e.g. autofocus and resistance zero), makes me wonder if the author himself or early adopters of the methods of GED would ultimately not recommend these methods in GED after all, or place some additional asterisks on them or context around them, etc.

If anyone could point me to a pre-existing resource like this that provides a high-level summary of the evolution of Mark's task management systems and the rationale behind it, or give some off the cuff first-draft versions of what you think such a resource would say, that would be very helpful for me!

(1)

Before this era of open experimentation this website testifies to begun, Mark had written his three classic books "GED", "Dreams" and "DIT" respectively. In those days a lot of discussion happened on the web for a variety of overlapping reasons. At that time Autofocus was developed and published openely and freely according to the spirit of the internet culture of those days.

In the subsequent years through experimentation the bulk of the open time management systems got developed. Chronologically relatively late the "No List" type of system. At that time Mark wrote his book "Secrets" in it featuring the No List systemt "5 Tasks", latter dubbed 5T, PTMS and finally 5/2 in the discussions on this site.

But even then development of time management systems (TMS) did not come to an halt. Further interrogation of the endless possibilites of the Long List, the No List and other approaches is relatively closely documented on Mark's blog.

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Mark commented a few times on some key issues along that path. For one, after releasing Dreams he encountered the opportunity to ascent into a professional pane of a more "new agey" flavour, but that didn't reasonate with him.

At that point, my guess is because of the then prevalent discussions of how to sort and order one's various task lists to attain a higher state of productivity, he worked with the presumption that people liked theire lists. His original stance was to work with "no list at all" and Dreams is indeed such a TMS, but the attachment of the many to their lists made Mark to work on providing list based systems again.

His first take, DIT, provided people with lists that would bring matters down to earth about how much actually could be done. It proved to be somewhat popular in the scene of people who tried to get David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) work for them, but couldn't. The earlier threads on these forums testify to this quite a bit.

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Also Mark stated on his blog that GTD is the only other method he recommends besides his own, there was a clear main point of critique discernable. When would one go about doing all those tasks in one's GTD or any other system for that matter?

With DIT the answer was clear: everything that is in the system gets done at some point. Underlying this is the principle that gave his first book GED and subsequently this website it's title. Even in his latest book, "Secrets" Mark discusses in detail why formal prioritization of tasks doesn't work. Some things fail to get done.

The most prevalent critique of GTD practicioners who abandone the system eventually is the problem of lost oversight and a frequent failure to get the most important things, ahem, done.

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With his next major leap in TMS inventions, the original Autofocus, Mark deviated a bit from this earlier wisdom. Autofocus acts as a "catch-all" system and introduces a dismissal process, both parts lead to the inclusion of tasks that will just never get done. Which is not a failure, but it places Autofocus in the same category as GTD and all those other TMS consisting of long lists of tasks, ideas and challenges.

Mark gave the metaphor of a "tough mudder" race of tasks, were the race itself decides what gets done and what fails to prove it's worth of engagement in the long run.

The biggest release of many subsequent Long List systems was supposedly FV - "Autofocus the Final Version" - which I think is the last fanfare on Mark's email newsletter and also prominently featured on the cutting edge anti-layout of this website. While it is final, history proved it not to be the last of it's kind. It's immediate successor FVP is probably the final point of a distintive strain in the development of the Long List TMS.


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Eventually Mark got back to providing a way of task management without a list, the concept of the No List system. With having a list that is just not a list, one could have all the benefits of a TMS and planning, without having to administer a list or any other "tool" of that sort. Plus one would get a detailed listing of what one had done during the day.

It is in this array of TMS that we find "The Next Hour", the only system of Mark's system, that according to Mark, works better digitally than with pen and paper.

However varied the shapes of Mark's TMS turned out to be, the time management principles working at their core remained remarkably stable. They are documented in his books and on this very website in numerous ways.

Let me highlight one of his major tenets in my own words: success comes from consistent action, applied over long periods of time in a continuous manner.

I have thought about this myself. I have read GED and DIT. These are closer to being systems like GTD. GTD is even more like a system and I think it aims to leave nothing left out. The thing is it's very hard to put in practice a system all at once and it can be overwhelming. and there's a difference between intellectually understanding a system and actually doing it.
I too have noticed that Mark Forster's methods sometimes seem contradictory.. I find it best to think of much of the TM systems here as being more like productivity hacks in the good sense of the word.

So a productivity hack is something that can be implemented right away, and tested, and stand alone, and abandoned if need be. There can be immediate results. Complicated time management systems can take a long time to implement, and longer to actually see the benefits.

The no-list (or the short list) or a long list (Autofocus, etc.) is not complete in itself. It is up to the user to determine how to fit it in.

I had a college piano teacher, who studied with a great piano teacher, and he wrote a book about her "system of piano playing". But she did not give him her whole system at once, but every week at his lesson she would give him tips. Years later after her death he put together his notes of her tips and came up with her system.

There are some great piano teachers who claim they have no system. There is one famous piano teacher who taught many students, and some of the students have written his "system" and they contradict each other at times. Often teachers will give different, even contradictory advice depending on the strengths and weaknesses of the student.

Some of the methods are interchangeable. It seems to me that just about all of the long list methods, as long as there is a long list, can be used and rotated after time on the same list.
The no-list methods are likely the same. It seems though to me that the principles of the long list and no-list are different.
Also the principles of DIT and Autofocus are different.
Some methods are able to be combined but others are not.
It is like the rules of a game. As long as you play the game the rules apply.
There is a post by Mark Forster where he explains his development. I will look for it.

Thanks Christopher, that is really helpful! Thanks also Mark H.

From what I gather, a high-level take on things might be that
- the central problem to be addressed by attention management systems is the problem of resistance
- the different approaches explored in Mark's work offer different ways of working with resistance, and which works best may depends on the person and context
- for instance, GET proposes meeting resistance head-on, but other approaches which are more amenable to what one feels like doing in the moment (e.g. autofocus) can also potentially address resistance effectively in more indirect ways (e.g. perhaps due to subconscious processes initiated by scanning, or how one will eventually "feel like" doing an urgent or important task one keeps seeing on one's list, etc.)
- it seems there has been a general trend over time away from "head-on" approaches to resistance in favor of more indirect approaches, which perhaps suggests something about the general efficacy of these two kinds of approaches in the experience of Mark and others?

Brian,

On resistance, one could:

Do what you resist most.
Do what you resist least.
Do what has zero resistance.

How do you harmonize this? To me, it's like proverbs. You could assemble proverbs that seem to contradict each other, from the Book of Proverbs, from the I Ching, from the sayings of Jesus.
It's up to us to apply them to the situation.

The books GED and DIT are more similar to systems like GTD. I remember somebody actually made of flowchart of DIT, similar to the work flowchart in GTD.
Autofocus grew out of DIT, which had a list, and made it a longer list.
I think many of the TM systems are really methods of dealing with a long list, and for the most part, as long as you have a long list, the methods are interchangeable, and you can switch methods without disturbing the list.
The No-list (or short list) drops the long list. The methods of dealing with this are similar. The Next Hour method seems to be the simplest one of them. Again this could be considered a hack. It keeps it simple.

The books Secrets and Pathways have tips that are like productivity hacks, meaning they can stand alone whatever else you are using.

So starting DIT and switching to Autofocus and then to the No-list, in the forum there was plenty of discussion of the difference of these. There is a post by Mark Forster where he explains why he moved from one to the other, but I can't find it right now.

I think some of what appears contradictory can be explained this way:
The long list is like a deck of 52 playing cards. The "TM systems" are like different games one could play using the same deck. Some games deal with the cards in ascending order, others in descending order, others deal with the suits. There are rules to the game, that are specific to the game. There are different rules for other games.
The rules are not moral imperatives, just a way of structuring the activity.
It seems that Mark Forster over the period of time has moved toward fewer rules, and keeping things simple.

My own minor contribution to this condensation/summing-up thread would be: all of Mark's methods are One Method: how to harmonize rational and intuitive parts of the mind so that you are doing what needs doing right now. To support that goal are the smaller practices: little and often, most important thing first thing, etc.

I flit between systems based on how tired I am, the busyness of the day, am I coming back from vacation and have a backlog, etc. It helps to stick with a system for a good long period of time (at least 2 months) so you get a sense of what it offers, what it doesn't offer to you.

Note: intuition, NOT impulse. Big difference.

And of course, reading Mark's blog posts and forum posts, he drops bon mots, techniques, frame of mind, practices, etc. that are good coachy tips on how to keep and stay organized for those of us to whom organization has to be worked at. (My wife, for instance, does not need organization/time management tips; she Just Knows what to do. I however am a shapeless blob that needs all the help he can muster.)

avrum & Brian:

Thank you for your kind words! They didn't get unnoticed.


Alan Baljeu:

Yes, indeed very good points you make towards the OP!

In all probability the "strike trough and re-enter" mechanic was invented by Mark Forster and published via the introduction of Autofocus.