Get Everything Done

Mark H. suggested that some of my previous posts discussing some of the history and summary of my own assessment of Mark Forster's time management research be posted together in a single thread dedicated to the topic. I'll happily oblige, though at a meandering pace. :-)

[Originally posted December 12, 2022 at 20:55 Aaron Hsu at: http://markforster.squarespace.com/forum/post/2792318 ]

I have mis-labelled the term "Accounting List". It's called an Accumulating List:

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2016/2/18/how-to-write-a-blog-post-a-day.html

I'm afraid the answer to what is better isn't so simple when it comes to Mark Forster's work, and moreover, I assume you already realize this, but Mark F moves around almost continuously through various approaches, mediated by larger overarching principles as he explores a given space. This means he's always exploring local optima for a given set of principles around doing work, rather than coming to any conclusions about a holistic/total strategy. This makes most of his advice much more tactical than strategic in practice.

MF also revisits ideas from time to time to see whether there is any new ground to explore, or to refine understanding of previous concepts. Thus, it's never accurate, really, to say that Mark has abandoned or "deprecated" any of his advice in the normal sense.

As for a time line, here's the way that I divide up a lot of Mark's work in summary:

GET EVERYTHING DONE: This era is dominated by the advice in the book and Mark's work with clients. He's exploring very tactical solutions and beginning to hone in on some general principles that will inform the rest of his work going forward.

DREAMS: At this point, driven by an emphasis on vision and goals, Mark goes a completely different way, and develops a systematic approach to driving one's life without the reified low level systems at all. This is Mark's first in-depth exploration of what I would call "no list" approaches. The underlying question that drives these methods are, "How can I create a life in which I can succeed while only ever doing what I feel like doing?" It is such a different approach and flies in the face of so many prevailing approaches, but as Mark says, he used it to build a highly successful business.

DO IT TOMORROW: Reflecting on the work of DREAMS and realizing that people had some issues with actually being willing to implement the somewhat nebulous introspective work that DREAMS requires ("People love their lists") as well as recognizing that exploring those concepts further would take Mark down the path of more Guru/Spiritualist rather than practical consultant, Mark returns to systematic methods and tries to tame the to-do list by leveraging the principle of the closed list and managing work in progress. In so doing, he invents what is probably the system that most closely competes directly with GTD in feel and overall aesthetic/strategy.

AUTOFOCUS: Seeing the challenge with keeping their systems well weeded and under control, Mark begins exploring ideas of leveraging intuition and the whole mind (c.f. DREAMS) to help manage to do lists in a process-driven way that doesn't depend on the up-front discipline required by traditional systems like DIT or GTD. The key driving design constraint here is whether a system can be created that allows for universal capture but somehow embed the rest of a system's management process in the act of working through the list, rather than requiring lots of overhead and up-front process before one even gets to doing something. After lots of exploration, the Autofocus system is born, and it represents a massive shift in perspective, becuase now one is using an algorithmic approach to list management that combines what used to be very discrete, separate processes into one that was driven by intuition and "standing out". The era of "trust the system" is born.

FV/FVP: While there are many other systems that are developed throughout this time, FV and FVP represent a key turning point, in that they are at least, what Mark envisioned would be his last systems before "getting out of the game" as it were. They dig into the ideas of delay and structured procrastination as well as intuitive task ordering as a way to help manage the intensity that can sometimes come from AF-style systems. They represent one of the most enduring set of algorithms around which many other systems are based.

NO-LIST: By this time, Mark has pushed "catch-all" list systems a very far way, and he begins to return to the question that he asks every so often, "do we even need the list?" Having already explored these concepts a little bit in DREAMS and "Predicting your day" methods, Mark integrates low-level systems, DIT concepts of the closed/WIP-limited list, and the intuitive elements of trusting your own mind's sense of what needs doing to produce the no-list methods. He writes SoPP as a collection of strategies for improving efficiency and productivity as well as creativity without "writing another book on time management." The no-list methods go well with the Inbox Zero craze and also inspire others to create some of the most successful systems explored here by others, such as Serial No-list by Seraphim. They also begin to embrace the concept of "don't do it all" in a different way. The no-list methods prove one of the most "fast" systems available, able to process vast amounts of work rapidly and efficiently because of their extremely low overhead and high focus/concentration.

INTUITIVE LISTS: After exploring no-list, Mark begins to re-evaluate the very idea of the function of a list. Previously, there was a bit of an assumption that your list represented, at least psychologically, the set of all the things that you intended, wanted, or needed to do, and so, the longer it got, the worse you felt, and not finishing the whole list, or at least processing it all, felt something like a failure. Mark subverted these expectations within his own frame of reference by instead thinking of the list as a "seed bed" of possibilities, and treating the list as a potential for action, under the explicit assumption that it doesn't matter how much or how little on the list gets done as long as the right things get done. This will continue to inform Mark's work pretty much the rest of the time on this blog.

----

So, at present, Mark still tends to find a long list system (provided that it is actioned intuitively as above) his preferred way of working, and most others also find this to be their preferred way of working. However, many on this forum have also discovered that a combination of the right routines and things like journaling and structured days have allowed them to remove or eliminate most of their lists entirely (much in the way that a no-list or DREAMS method might work). Mark is known to take advantage of no-list systems for various things from time to time, and he isn't afraid to move from system to system to try out new things. Though, he does recommend against a constant switching of systems in general.

So, there are really a few distinct phases of "lists" in Mark's body of work. The DIT methods, the AF methods pre-"Intuition", and the post-Intuition long lists (which include all previous long list methods refactored for intuitive action) such as NQ-FVP. Mark's no-list methods are primarily documented in DREAMS and SoPP as well as supported by his explorations on this blog.

As for which is best? Well, I don't think there's any consensus on that here or in Mark's own mind! Mark has said multiple times before that the book on the intuitive long list never got written because he couldn't nail down the right system for the book.

[Continuing within the above thread...]

The following post established a sort of "new era" of the "intuitive" list based on standing out, especially under the concepts around not expecting to do everything on the list.

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/2/6/the-natural-selection-of-tasks.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/2/7/natural-selection-changes-the-emphasis.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/6/17/thoughts-on-the-long-list.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/10/6/thoughts-on-the-long-list-accepting-that-it-wont-all-get-don.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/10/9/thoughts-on-the-long-list-making-everything-easy.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/10/3/thoughts-on-the-long-list-update.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/7/25/standing-out.html

[And further on in the same thread...]

Simple scanning wasn't given a name until around 2017 as you mention. I believe 2016 was about the highlight and crest of Mark's work on no-list systems. See also these posts:

http://markforster.squarespace.com/fv-forum/post/2777843
http://markforster.squarespace.com/fv-forum/post/2764356

A "catch all" list was what things were called for a while, but the term "long list" is associated with Mark's explorations of catch-all lists in the context of intuitive actioning. That is, the long list methods are methods that leverage catch all lists, but they also tend to involve additional expectations when terming them "MF Long List" methods. GTD is a catch-all method as well, but quite a different one.

Here's a post on what a no-list is:

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2016/2/12/what-is-a-no-list-system.html

And then a series on types of lists:

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2016/1/25/types-of-lists-i-the-catch-all-list.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2016/1/26/types-of-lists-ii-daily-and-weekly-lists.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2016/1/27/types-of-lists-iii-the-daily-open-list.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2016/1/28/types-of-lists-iv-no-list-lists.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2016/1/29/types-of-list-v-using-no-list-at-all.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2016/1/30/types-of-list-vi-so-which-is-best.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2016/1/31/types-of-list-vii-what-do-we-need-in-a-no-list-system.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2016/2/1/types-of-lists-viii-the-dynamic-list.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2016/2/2/types-of-lists-ix-an-effective-no-list-system.html

However, before no-list methods were created, Mark had spent significant time working on various types of long list systems. No-list methods were presented as a fundamental alternative to the long list, and so "integrating" the two of them, while some people try to do it, isn't really philosophically feasible.

However, before really settling in on the no-list idea for a while, Mark did integrate the two with the concept of the feeder list, which was what I think of as a transitional system design. He does this in his work on the 3T system, which he tended to feed from a long list.

Systems like DIT are not really long list methods, and predate the concept.

The other thing is that prior to no-list, Autofocus explored the concept of standing out, but Mark hadn't put an emphasis on "Natural selection of tasks" via standing out in quite the same way. Instead, systems like FVP and FV leverage very systematic, rational questioning as a way to select tasks. Later, integrating intuition via standing out came through systems like NQ-FVP and Re:Zero.

Mark has said before that he only puts things on a long list that are going to be active. As with most of Mark's methods, there is an expectation that you have a calendar and tickler system that can store things which aren't relevant right now. The time management systems that Mark focuses on are specifically about managing the actions you can take right now, not planning or scheduling as a project discipline. They are all designed to integrate into some system of information organization and calendaring, but they are agnostic to how you do any of that.

Mark has also in the past advocated for a strong separation between things that are on your authorized projects list or commitments list, and those things that are not. However, with the switch to "natural selection" or intuitive lists, he explored the possibility that some things may want to get on your list so that you can evaluate them for commitment. However, there is always the danger that something sits around on your list taking up useless time and energy. This is why Mark puts emphasis on weeding your list appropriately when you are doing an intuitive long list, and this is the long list equivalent of pruning your commitments in prior systems.

When you combine active weeding of your list and intuition, then you end up with a catch-all list that contains a whole bunch of potential things that get weeded down to your current commitments through working the system. It's still a catch-all system, but the intent is that things which are going nowhere will be happily and intentionally left to either lay fallow on the list or be removed entirely as not mattering. Mark has always strongly opposed the concept of the "Someday/Maybe" list or any other list that represents your unfulfilled wishes in a form that promises you that someday you'll get to them.

Put another way, the catch-all nature of any long list isn't intended to retain all possible information, but rather, that you should be able to have the system catch all *incoming* tasks/items/ideas/thoughts, and that the system will "handle" them in some meaningful way, often times (maybe even most of the time!) dropping them off the list entirely to be blissfully forgotten for now and intentionally neglected. In this context, catch-all is about catching stuff coming at you, not keeping stuff after you've caught it.

There's a lot of common principles across Mark's work, but there are many ideas that were intentionally explored as diametric opposites, specifically as alternatives to one another and different ways of working. Mark has always professed himself an experimenter.

Case in point, Mark has consistently revisited Autofocus over the years through different lenses, and goes in and out of favor with it as one of the "best systems". Lately he has seemed to determine, again, that the problems with the system outweigh the benefits, but the point is that he is always ready to revisit something if he thinks he's found a new way to go at it.

[Originally posted December 2, 2021 at 9:05 here: http://markforster.squarespace.com/fv-forum/post/2787144 ]

If I can interpret Mark's work a little bit, I'd say that Mark addresses your concerns by telling you, essentially, to stop trying to solve the problem through more sophisticated, complicated, or involved methods of organizing your work. Instead, Mark espouses a set of principles for engaging with your work that are then practiced by implementing a type of mechanical system or a set of habits to engage with your work using these principles. Among these various principles, I'd say that the following are the most important:

* Simplicity
* Minimal organization
* Pruning commitments
* Standing out or "using intuition"
* Little and Often
* Systematic engagement/routine
* No "on the ground" prioritization based on importance

To work with these principles, Mark has a bunch of tricks and perspectives, but also tends to focus significantly on "low level time management systems". In other words, systems for helping you to choose the right thing to focus on at any given moment and to focus on that thing without worrying about the other things.

These systems can be roughly divided into what I think of as 4 major kinds:

* Goal/vision driven (The Dreams methodology)
* Long list systems (Autofocus, FVP/FV, Simple Scanning, &c.)
* No-list systems (5/2, NL-FVP, &c.)
* Closed list systems (Do It Tomorrow)

The way that Mark generally assumes that you will be working is that you will have the following "minimal" systems:

1. A calendar for appointments and dated items
2. Any project notes/materials that are for information/reference
3. A low level time management system

And optionally, for some systems, if your low-level time management system doesn't include it, you will have an "authorized projects" list which is a list of your on-going commitments in your life or "things you are committed to working on." The Dreams method is a little unique in its approach, so it's best to think of it as its own thing.

Most of Mark's systems focus on how to manage your discretionary time, which is the time in which you can choose what you are doing, rather than having a hard time commitment. So, appointments and other hard time blocks would be on your calendar/diary, but there will be, presumably, blocks of time in which you have discretion as to what you can do in that time. Mark focuses on how to manage this, and generally encourages you to maximize the amount of discretionary time that you have.

Mark generally doesn't spend a lot of time on how you would manage your project notes or your calendar (in the above sense). It's assumed that you will have some reference system in place and some calendar of suitable power in places. At that point, you have to figure out the system you will use to choose what to do when you have discretionary time, which is where the bulk of Mark's systems spend the majority of their time.

You talk about organizing projects and addressing important tasks. I've already mentioned that Mark assumes you have some way of keeping project notes, so I'm assuming you are talking about organizing the "tasks" that you have to do to complete or work on a project. A big point that Mark tends to make is that once you have committed to doing something, you've committed to doing it, and so it has to get done, regardless. Thus, after commitment, everything is of equal priority. Generally speaking, Mark has made apoint of noting that the time for prioritization based on importance is best handled before you commit to doing something. If you are committed to something, then you need to do it. At that point, urgency is really the only other thing that matters.

What usually happens is that people have more than they can possibly get done on their plate at a given time, and they have a fuzzy degree of commitment to these things. They, in other words, lack clarity about what they have committed to doing and what they are just wishing/hoping that they will do at some point. Mark generally argues that it's not worth spending time upfront to plan and organize all of these tasks that you have when you likely don't even have the time to complete them all in the first place. Any time spent organizing and prioritizing just means that you are spending time on things that you likely won't even complete or do at all.

Thus, Mark generally recommends that we stop this sort of organizational and planning flagellation and utilize a low level time management system to help us to drive immediate action and improve clarity over what we can do, what we have time to do, and what we really want to commit to doing. It's an "agile method" of working, where we focus on doing what we can do, and letting the rest go, while eliminating or greatly reducing the amount of planning time that we may waste by taking away from the time we could be spending doing things.

Mark has addressed these problems in a variety of pretty novel ways, IMO. If you are interested in an approach that is much more structured (by Mark's standards) and is built on the idea of very consciously trying to calibrate your life so that the amount of work you are doing matches the amount of work you are adding to your plate, then the DIT (Do It Tomorrow) method is his most well known "closed list" method of this sort and you can read that book to find out more about that.

However, that's not the only way to go about it. Mark has also developed a set of practices around the idea of "no-list" time management systems. His book "Secrets of Productive People" generally is organized around this idea, and he talks about things at length in that book. In this approach, you think hard and maintain a clear sense of what you are allowing onto your plate through an Authorized Projects list, but to choose what you do from moment to moment, you use a no-list system.

A no-list system is a low level time management system in which you create a new list of work you intend to do from the top of your head (and also any reminders that have been put into your calendar). That list is kept intentionally very short, and you work immediately off of that list, filling it up as you complete the work. This way, the work is always fresh and nothing is standing around building up fear, resistance, or stress on the list. The method in SoPP is the 5/2 method, which is to list five items, and then work them using the "little and often" principle until there are only two level, and then adding three more to bring the total back up to five.

Finally, Mark's most popular set of time managements systems is probably his set of long list systems. In these systems, the main artifact that you work from is a single list of all the stuff you might do. This represents not a set of commitments, but a set of possibilities that you might do. The idea here is to simplify all of your organization by not prioritizing, planning, or pre-filtering any of the items that go onto the list. Instead, you just put almost any sort of task, project, or idea of something you could do onto the list. It's also called a "catch-all" list. The idea is that it all goes into the list, except for things that go on your calendar and reference information that you keep for specific projects.

By just putting it all onto the list, you don't need to organize or do anything else to your work before you start working on it. This is unlike the no-list and DIT systems, which have some degree of "pre-processing" in which you have to decide whether something, for instance, will be allowed onto your authorized projects list. Since the list represents possibilities, rather than commitments, you can put pretty much anything and everything on there.

The key differentiator in Mark's long list systems is that they are all some set of algorithms/rules for how you process and do things on that list. These various algorithms are the "TM Systems" that everyone here talks about. Each one is designed to help you do a few things, but primarily they are there to help you choose something to do in the moment and also just as importantly, highlight things on the list that you are *not* doing anything on and thus should maybe be removed (dismissed) from the list, delegated, or otherwise reworded or adjusted. Thus, long list systems are designed as sieves for filtering out the work that you want to do versus the work that really isn't something you want to do.

Some key components of most of Mark's long list systems are the concept of little and often and standing out. Choosing to do something in these systems generally means you do "as much or as little work as you want to or feel like doing" before you stop. Once you stop, the systems will usually have some rule for how you re-enter the work if you aren't done with it so that you can continue the work at a later date. This is a part of the "little and often" principle. Systems that are based on "standing out" are those in which you generally choose what to do based on a set of simple rules that guide you to selecting a task which "stands out" to you as ready to be done by using your intuition.

There are numerous blog posts and discussion posts about all of these topics and getting a complete understanding of them takes time and requires that you work the systems in earnest to see how they work in practice.

Part of what can make Mark's work difficult is that there is so much of it spread over so many different areas that has evolved over time. My recommendation is that you read Secrets of Productive People and Do It Tomorrow. If you want to see a totally different approach, read How to Make Your Dreams Come True. But you also should read through the blog as much as you can, as it contains the evolution of Mark's ideas over time and includes all of the work on long list systems that were not including in the books.

Finally, as for where to start, I'd say start with the blog and Autofocus, which is the OG of the long list systems.

http://markforster.squarespace.com/autofocus-system

IMO, this is the best way to get started with Mark's approach to productivity. You'll want to read through all of the blog posts on the various topics. For a different long list system, I would recommend that you explore FVP and Simple Scanning next:

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2021/11/16/the-final-version-perfected-fvp-instructions-reposted.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/12/2/simple-scanning-the-rules.html

To get an overview of trade-offs for a lot of popular systems, see here:

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/category/review-of-systems

I'd also read the "Type of Lists" series to get some thoughts on the various types of lists:

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2016/1/25/types-of-lists-i-the-catch-all-list.html

And I'd read the following series as well for a sense of how Mark approach the "biggest problems in Time management":

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2018/9/16/the-biggest-problems-in-time-management-intro.html

And then a few other recommendations:

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/10/10/top-10-advantages-of-the-long-list.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/10/9/thoughts-on-the-long-list-making-everything-easy.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/7/25/standing-out.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/10/6/thoughts-on-the-long-list-accepting-that-it-wont-all-get-don.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/6/17/thoughts-on-the-long-list.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/2/6/the-natural-selection-of-tasks.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2016/12/18/systematic-fast-and-flexible.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/2/7/natural-selection-changes-the-emphasis.html

Yeah, I'm not super stoked about that GPT summary! LOL

One thing I think is missing from discussions about many of these systems is how they never exist in isolation. Specifically, I've thought about how to think about the "minimalism" or "complexity" of each system. When considering this, it's not enough to just take the specific time management system into account, but one must also consider how that time management system affects all other systems that need to be in place or are assumed to be in place to make life management possible.

For example, no-list systems might appear to be more minimal than long list methods, but that's not really true if you examine them holistically in terms of how they affect the rest of your systems. The same goes for things like DREAMS and DIT.

A no-list system requires, IMO, a few additional things to work properly, which are all disucssed in the SoPP book: authorized commitment lists, dynamic lists, calendars, inboxes, and an appropriate journalling habit for questioning. Likewise, the DREAMS method requires good systems for managing incoming work and caching it, which is implied in the book itself, as well as lots of introspective writing, vision collection, and coaching work.

For an evaluation of the complexity of a system, I'd want to consider the following things:

* How many discrete systems are used to keep things running
* How much management overhead of these systems exists
* How many different sources of input or tasks or work exist
* How many different storage locations for information exist
* How many habits are in play on a regular basis
* What is the realistic number of tools in use for management
* What is the communication overhead between the various systems
* What is the management cost per action
* What is the cycle time or latency between actions
* What is the cycle time between "red work" and "blue work" (doing vs thinking about doing)
* What is the relative decision load for each discrete action taken

I think all of these things are critical to understanding the various systems that Mark has worked on.

Regarding the timeline, I'm a little skeptical, but I've not done a timeline myself, so I'd need to check things out to be sure. I do know that roughly around 2015 - 2016 was when the major no-list work and shifts to intuitive lists were taking place.

I have in my head that somewhere around 2009 was the big AF push. I'm not sure about the rest of it.