Get Everything Done

I don't know if this topic has been discussed here in depth before, but it's worth a revisit, I think, and I like your assessment.

There is a general pattern that I have observed within any successful time management system which exactly mirrors your system 1 & 2 separation.

If we start with one of the big greats of intuitive time management, David Allen, and look at GTD, it's funny that DA eventually, over many years, had one major piece of advice for people that he called something like the lynchpin of the whole thing, the Weekly Review. He said, I think, something along the lines that the main reason GTD breaks down for most people is that they fail to do their weekly reviews. In an intuitive system like GTD, the Weekly Review is exactly that deliberation, system 2 thinking that DA thought was necessary to keep the thing in good health.

If you look at the no-list, DIT, Dreams, and Time Surfing methods, you find more or less the same thing.

In no-list, you have the authorized commitments list, which essentially serves as the anchor for what GTD would call the Weekly Review, and you are supposed to assess that authorized commitments list when needed.

In DIT, as mentioned, there is the assessment of system failure, which I think is mostly the same thing.

In DREAMS, you could argue that the whole thing is anchored around the Goal Achievement Method (GAM), and that, in itself, is a little like establishing and doing a review for yourself. It's also interesting that unlike some methods, your Future Vision isn't fixed, but rather, you're expected to rewrite and reengage with it on, nominally, a weekly basis. :-) This Future Vision can zoom in and out as needed, and it essentially serves as a Weekly Review and the deliberate anchoring for your intuition. All the other stuff, like self-coaching and the what's better list are tools to help build up the details.

Time Surfing, ironically, has something of the same thing. Lists are eschewed as a time management tool in the "now," but the cost of that is that there are a bunch of methods for creating just in time engagement with any piece of work to "build a relationship" with that work. This is actually quite deliberate work and is probably a system 2 sort of thing. It's that conscious visitation with your work, visualization of it, and the conscious understanding of our relationship with the work that Time Surfing argues embeds the work into a positive framework in our intuition that lets us choose what to do in the moment with confidence. But, even here, we see that Time Surfing encourages what amounts to a Weekly Review. This is where you sit down, probably with pen and paper, and write up an overview. This is where you list out your projects, tasks, things on your mind, and so forth. You draw up the connections between everything and do the thinking and organizing around the work until you feel emotionally and consciously able to understand and see your work in the large. This is pretty much exactly the GTD weekly review. Then, these checklists, reminders, thoughts, and so forth are put away or discarded completely, and you run by your intuition again, until it's time to reengage with system 2 at the appropriate interval. Time surfing permits a checklist of reminders, but you don't actually look at it, and you use it only to prime the intuition again if you need to do so because you get a signal from your intuition that it has lost a grasp on the whole. In that sense, the checklist in Time Surfing serves a lot like the Predicting Your Day list.

And then you have your long list systems, which also, in a sense, have incorporated this sort of weekly review via weeding. You're constantly reviewing your lists, so in a sense you're constantly engaging with your work, which is necessary given that you are not doing the heavier preprocessing that you would with Time Surfing or GTD. But you also need to prune your lists to make sure that things are still relevant and meaningful, which is essential to the intuition.

But, in the end, all of these systems inevitably incorporate both system 1 and 2, in one way or another, and it's remarkable how similarly all the intuitive systems incorporate system 2 thinking in very similar ways, that is, a periodic overview type process designed to clarify and refine.

And, perhaps, the main cause of system failures that we have seen all tend to be a failure to adequately leverage the appropriate symbiosis between these two modes of operation. In GTD, failure to keep up your weekly reviews destroys the system for most people (and is often cited as the main cause of failure). In long lists, failure to adequately address your list "honesty" causes the list to bog down or repel you. In no-list, failure to understand your authorized commitments causes you to overwhelm yourself and be unable to account for your responsibilities. In DREAMS, failure to engage with your vision and reflect on the interplay between your present and future can lead to drifting aimlessly and feeling stressed and insecure. In DIT, well, that's self evident. In Time Surfing, failure to gain an appropriate overview undermines your intuition and causes you to be unable to flow appropriately with your work, and failure to engage with your tasks and befriend them means that they will always be avoided in your work.

What I think all of these things have in common is that we all love a system that just works and feels good all the time, which, IMO, occurs primarily when our obligations and our commitments align with our available time, energy, and purpose; but, when the system fails, it seems often to be a case where that alignment breaks somehow. For example, I think for many of us here, that happens because our desires outstrip our capabilities. We desire to have all of this stuff done or to accomplish this or that, but as we wish more and more, which inevitably ends up somewhere in our system, or we take on more, we hit that point where there is no longer any way that we can really do it all. And then, unless we are humble and astute enough with ourselves to rapidly and accurately restrain our desires to the things that we can do, we will inevitably overwhelm ourselves and our systems.

I know that is something I'm quite guilty of. If I look into many of my system failures, they occur simply because my pride of ambition causes me to demand more than the system itself can provide, because the system itself cannot really get me to do more than I am able to sustainably accomplish.

I have to admit that I never found the system 2 heavy level of pre-processing my inbox in GTD to bog down that much, but a big part of that was the ability to leverage the Someday/Maybe list and reliance on the Weekly Review.

One of the issues with a long list that no-list fixed was the dynamic level of automatic dismissal rates. A long list has the advantage that you never forget, and this can quickly become a disadvantage for things that you are emotionally unable to let go of, but which you really ought to forget about for a while. In the same way that AF1 caused a degree of anxiety about dismissal, I think no-list's major contribution is also the thing that scares people the most, which is the power of accepting that you will forget things, and indeed, that you *should* forget things.

The issue with the growth of a long list, I think, is systemic of the fundamental difficulty in saying no to things, or at least, not right now. We are good at procrastinating, but procrastination isn't just about not doing something, it's about holding on to the desire to do that thing, while also not doing it right now. Instead, if we allow ourselves to reject the doing of a thing for some amount of time, this is a freeing proposition which is different than procrastination.

The human memory is already a highly tuned machine for forgetting things. It's designed to efficiently dismiss things that aren't relevant. Intuitive management of dismissal, I think, is probably akin to leveraging your memory for dismissal. When done right, things that aren't really the important things in your life will just...disappear, with essentially zero effort on your part. I think any externalized memory aid is fundamentally going to undermine intuitive dismissal and "task backlog size" by definition. It's an inherently system 2 approach to managing the set of work items that are available to do. That doesn't mean that it is a bad one, just that I don't think it's necessarily possible to make an intuitive way to manage list length while still using a long list.

I've often thought that one of the issues we have when we say that we don't want to forget things is that very often the things that most worry us might be signals to ourselves of things that we wish were true about us (that is, we wish were important), but which in fact aren't actually important enough, and so they sit around as fantasies that cause us anxiety because we aren't willing to either sacrifice to have them, or accept that we don't care enough to do so. A long list can allow such things to live longer than they should while clogging up your daily life more than they should, especially without the active dismissal process.

I like Mark Forster's idea a while back that he proposed for managing this: select items that aren't going to be done right now or that really aren't present priorities or active things that you can do or want to do; place those items on your someday/maybe list; now, throw that list away. This is a cheeky way of getting yourself okay with throwing items away and pruning your list. I think it's a slightly more nuanced version of the above suggestion to start a fresh list every so often.

Since I'm doing Time Surfing, I actually do the opposite approach. Essentially, I'm always relying on my memory to do in the moment dismissal. Then, all I have is a someday/maybe list. Whenever my intuition pings on the need to "refill" my tank of tasks, I can review that someday maybe list and see if there is anything there that jogs my memory, but in the day to day, I never look at the list. This is more or less the same as no-list's authorized commitments. The benefit here is the same as no-list: the list never grows out of control. Time Surfing's added benefit is the sheer amount of internal processing you do to prime your intuition, which is meditative in nature, and I like that.

There's a little micro-nuance here that we can explore. There's the management of the actual size of the active working set of tasks and items that you have to manage at any one time, and then there is the actual work of figuring out what you are going to do about any task (delete it, maybe). Sometimes, a system 2 approach to managing your WIP (a la Kanban) means that both the management of the size of the WIP *and* the assessment of tasks is done with system 2. However, it's also possible that you can manage the WIP set with system 1, but rely on system 2 to actually understand and work through "stuck" items.

I think someone in another thread mentioned the idea of sitting with tasks that aren't going anywhere, and that might be a good way of thinking about it. You go through, and you find a task on your list that is stuck, that hasn't been going anywhere, and you decide to do some work on it, but not active work. instead, you dot the task (in SS) and then you sit with the task and try to get the shape of it, visiting it in your mind, until you make progress on "unlocking" that task for yourself in some way. Maybe you rewrite it, maybe you do something else, but at any rate, even if you don't actually *do* anything on the task, you'll have massaged that task a little more explicitly. And that might be sufficient work on that task for the moment.

The checklist idea is one tried and true way to manage task list growth. One thing that I think might be a little compelling is to have a bunch of business cards with checklists of small tasks that I want to do repetitively in a given area. So, what you could do is incorporate a little of the GTD Contexts concept for the granular tasks. You could have a box of cards for "Morning Routine" and "Evening Routine" and "Lunch Break" or the like which represent your checklist for those times. When you wake up in the morning, you grab one of those business cards which has the same checklist on it, fresh and new, and then go about your morning with that little card, crossing off as you go. Then, when you're done, toss it into a done pile or trash it, depending on how you want to record things. When you go to sleep, you can grab a fresh evening routine card and do the same thing.

These would be pre-written cards (maybe printed?) that have your checklist on them already.

Then, it's easy to just put "evening routine" or "Morning routine" on your simple scanning list, and this is a method of working Mark has spoken about in the past. That can easily reduce scanning effort and time, as well as improve overall efficiency of the routines.

You can technically scale this technique to have hierarchies of long lists, such as cards containing lists for admin, project A, home, etc. I've never found that particularly useful myself, but it could be a big help for those who need to manage the length of a long list but still want to maintain the granularity of very small tasks. Technically, it's also "within canon" for simple scanning and other long list methods, for those who care about such things (I do, for irrational reasons).

Another simple way of doing this is to split your long list into "home" and "work" or by physical location.

This is one of those things that hits another tension in time management. The degree to which you are schedule is inversely proportional to the degree to which you need to have very good control on your intuition for what you want to do next. When a long list is a small part of a regimented, schedule routine, then list growth and scanning tends not to be a problem, because the list is short. But the less scheduled, routinized stuff you have in your life, the longer and more difficult the list becomes.

100%...especially this forum. There's a shared appreciation for the geekery of introspection on your productivity which isn't found in most daily environments. Frankly, most people in person that I've discussed this stuff with haven't spent nearly the time to think about it that I have, and thus, it's more of a lecture than a discussion. It's nice to see and hear from people who are thinking about these things.

I think it has been noted by some that we can sort of think about people along some certain timeline of "productivity" or "performance" or "life engagement" or whatever you may want to call it.

The first group is those people who go about their lives not putting much intention into any of that, or only the attention that is externally foisted on them. They might be called "drifters," but most of the world gets by in this class, and they may not even be aware of what impacts not thinking about such things has on their life, or how the pressures of productivity can or cannot help them.

The second group are those people who somehow move from the first group into those who start to actually think about these things. It is often the case that people in this second group have some kind of motivating influence that drives their desire for success, performance, or productivity. Often, it might be a negative motivation, such as not wanting to be poor or escaping a life that they saw/see as undesirable. I think a lot of people get into productivity because of some sort of existential fear, whether they acknowledge that or not.

The third group is that group who actually have "succeeded" in some respects. I think many of us fall into this third group. I would be surprised if I met most people here and we weren't all more or less objectively successful. Based on what I've seen on this forum, I think the majority of us are doing at least better than average, and probably even quite a bit better than average.

Ironically, I think in this third group, after you've kind of managed to avoid or at least stave off something of that existential dread that drove you to productivity and action in the first place, there's a challenge in somehow finding both contentment in the now and also that fear of becoming complacent. I think I've seen it noted that for people who have already "grinded" for success at some level, it's often difficult to move beyond that fear that drove them in the first place, and ultimately, the challenge becomes finding a level of rest, contentment, and purpose without needing to be stressed by the existential dread that drove them to the heights they are presently at.

There's a sort of twist, I find, at this "third level," where going further, or "leveling up," whatever that may mean, often requires attenuating that inner desire for more, and finding the patience and perspective that maybe we didn't have when we were younger. I've met a lot of people who struggled to escape that initial drive. They were successful, but that success also made them so stressed and unhappy that they really weren't any better off. They couldn't let go of the fear that drove them, and so they kept feeling a need to push higher and higher, without really understanding why they were doing it. The end result was usually lots of suffering, discontent, and maybe the opposite of what they really wanted.

To be clear, I also think that it shouldn't be and probably is not required that we go through this whole process through 1, 2, and then 3, but I've noted that it seems particularly difficult for most people not to go through them linearly. There are some people who seem to have clicked with that early in life, and they are able to skip 1 and 2 and maybe even 3. But those people seem to be quite rare, and I'm not sure that the reality isn't different than what I see in them.

For myself, I find that my ambitions are still high, but with high ambitions comes the need to execute with patience, in a way that wasn't necessary before, because previously, it was much easier to see what needed to be done, and the rewards were much more obvious. Now, having achieved much of what I set out to do, the loftier ambitions require patience and humility in a way that the previous steps did not, and that forces me to change the way I look at productivity. I also know that I have a strong tendency to not really want to do anything, while wanting to do everything, all at once, and that's something quite annoying to wade through.

Is it even possible to be both utterly content and ambitious at the same time?

<<Aaron Hsu wrote about how different kinds of people engage with time management, perhaps at different phases in their personal growth. That's an interesting perspective, but it doesn't seem to account for the Chris types. What do you think?>>

IME, people who are serious about time management always have a system. They might not call it that, but it is always there. I'd put those people in the second group still, because they are aware of and working on improving their own time management but they do so using systems that might be inaccessible to people whose personalities and backgrounds don't mesh well with how they approach work.

In my personal life, I've noticed that people who tend to be dismissive of time management systems but still care a lot about time management and "getting things done" tend to exist inside of environments that do a lot of the time management for them, and they often have a personality that is very concrete and conscientious, so they will tend to focus on doing things anyways. In such environments, the work and the outcomes are often clearly scoped or clearly defined. Sometimes the systems that are being used as so habitualized that they don't even realize that they are relying on routinized systems for their work to succeed.

In such environments and with such personalities, there's a certain "privilege" or luxury that you can have, because you don't need to use the systems to manage your time as well, because your personality already drives you to action, and your working conditions already give you sufficient constraint and direction that you don't have to ask a lot of questions about where you're going. However, these same people who are highly effective at working in these conditions, I've noticed, tend to completely shut down or utterly avoid anything that would threaten to take them outside of these conditions that permit them to be successful.

Thus, in such cases, while these people can be highly productive within a specific environment, they tend to be almost useless in navigating uncharted waters; assessing risk-rewards around the need to change or innovate on meta-questions like mission, vision, direction, etc.; or, handling situations defined by desirable outcomes, but without constraints, directions, patterns, or recipes. I've seen some highly productive people go from on the ball to utterly adrift simply because the external environment changed and they didn't have the internal tooling to quickly assess and create order from that chaos.

I've never met a successful knowledge worker who operates in unconstrained, undefined environments that are unfamiliar and untested who didn't have systems and who didn't at least think about systems to some degree, and value their implementation. The more chaotic the situation, the more internal systems and checklists tend to help, almost by definition, because without the ability to assess and manage chaos internally, you are dependent on living in an ordered environment to succeed.

In my own work, this manifests in the differences in how some people work with software. I work in completely uncharted waters in which there is no end goal, no intermediate benchmarks, and nothing that I don't define myself. I'm working on things that literally have no prior precedence and that people haven't done at all before. In this sense, I'm on the literal cutting edge of various types of knowledge spaces, and so there is zero predictability. This is where having systems makes all the difference, because you need to know how to navigate and define how you're going to explore the space, and how to value where you're going and what you are doing, but that all comes mostly from yourself in this environment.

In contrast, many people in computing are surprised by how undefined my work is because they are used to working within environments in which the constraints are very obvious. Moreover, some of the people who pride themselves the most on being able to "deliver on time," if I press them, have to admit that the reason they can predict whether they can deliver on time or not is because they only ever take on work that they fully understand, and that they have already done before, so they know how to do it. They are just repeating work that they have already done, so it is relatively predictable. But the key here is that they don't count the time it takes for them to understand the problem. When you ask them for estimates that also include the time that it will take to understand the problem first, and so forth, they can't. So, this means that they end up being highly conservative in what work they take on, because they won't commit to anything unless they can predict the outcomes. This leaves a lot of exploration on the table, and means that someone else has to do all the risky business of figuring out the problem space first, before they can commit to things.

These people who are able to productively repeat and apply their prior experience, versus engaging in largely unfamiliar areas that they haven't already explored, often feel that they don't need a lot of systems, at least in my experience, but they are also incapable of reliably exploring spaces that they don't know already. They fundamentally rely on the predictability of their environment and context to replace the need for systems to deal with the unknown.

Such people might still value time management and think about it carefully, but the systems they are relying on are different, and if they have enough experience, they will usually recognize the difference in working environments that allow various systems to exist or not exist and still get good results.

To add another dimension, groups 2 and 3 are more about how one engages with the drive for optimizing time management. People can dismiss personal time management systems but still be driven for productivity and output, and those people might still fall into group 2. There are then people who don't have need for explicit thinking about their personal time management systems because they are content to work in an environment which enables them to not need such systems directly, because they can leverage some other order in their environment, but they also don't need to push for more all the time, and they don't feel the existential dread driving them for more productivity and more output. Those people might fit into group 3.

I guess I'm saying that groups 1, 2, and 3 are more about awareness, motivation, drive, and focus, vs. whether or not you depend on your environment for order or whether you use a personal system to attain it.

<<It's also interesting to observe that all of these models focus as much on LEARNING as on getting stuff done. I wonder if that element of learning could be incorporated into a time management system, as an integral part of the system.>>

Learning is key. I don't know if learning belongs inside of the time management system itself, instead of being a principle that drives the priorities or assessment of things inside of the TMS. If we take Mark's definition of a TMS as a low level system for deciding what to do next, the system itself is often parameterized by our heuristics or value systems that help us to use the system. In that case, valuing learning highly will result in the system selecting high learning tasks, whereas shifting your values to something like execution might make the system select something else. I think at least when it comes to intuitive systems, this is how you'd incorporate learning.

The best book I've ever read on this topic is "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective" by Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman:

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Greatness-Cannot-Planned-Objective/dp/3319155237

They tackle this topic from the perspective of computer science research into solving search and path-finding problems. I find their arguments very compelling.

In short, the conclusion is that when you are dealing with environments in which the exact execution path is not *guaranteed* to be absolutely concretely known, the chance of a good outcome driven by execution and "just do things that move us towards the goal" thinking goes down precipitously. Instead, the best way to make progress is to emphasis selecting the "next thing" on the basis of which next thing will best improve novelty and knowledge. This is a heuristic that selects for maximum learning rather than maximum accomplishment. This turns out to be a generally more effective approach at getting to good results, at the cost of no longer being able to predict the exact good result you get.

If you apply that selection criteria to your own individual selection of items, then over time you become better and more effective. You essentially go from one thing that you can execute on reliably to the next thing, always trying to pick somewhere you can both reliably reach in "one hop" as well as that will maximize your future options and potential through novelty, direction, learning, etc.

Some systems are more apt to work with such a model, of course, but at some level, you can make almost any system work for you in this way if you slice the pie correctly.