Get Everything Done

I have had tremendous success with Time Surfing, but I have an extreme emotional attachment to AutoFocus (AF1). It's smooth, crisp, and flows beautifully. The other big systems like FVP or FV have somehow felt a little more ponderous and never clicked in the same way. The hardest part, of course, is embracing dismissal and being okay with that.

I've spent so much time successfully using Time Surfing, though, that I am not sure if I actually would do well with AF1 now. It makes me really wonder.

The first system that got me into Mark Forster's works was actually no-list 5/2. I used it to great success, and I still think Mark's no-list systems and philosophy are really powerful. My favorites are 5/2 and NL-FVP. As Mark once put it, I think 5/2 has more drawing power, but NL-FVP fits very smoothly into how I naturally think (which maybe is a bad thing).

All in all, I think AF1 is perhaps one of the most fun "productivity games" that is out there.

Jacob:

There's also another thing that might not be that happy for some of us. It is perhaps the case that Newport and Allen's successes are at least in part due to the fact that they *can* be so dogmatically consistent over the course of many years.

However, that consistency isn't always what people think. If you really dig into Newport of Allen's processes and lives, you'll see that they do quite a bit more experimentation than people will generally think they do, because they generally talk about the results of those experiments rather than "livestreaming" their experiments for the world. This gives a false impression of how dogmatic or inflexible they may be.

If you get really deep into Allen or Newport's work, you'll notice that they shift certain things over time on the basis of what they've found, and they report on failed experiments every so often.

I'd say that Allen is perhaps a little more geared towards experimentation than Newport is, but he's also spent more time developing a framework that allows him to absorb his experiments under the same umbrella of GTD. In particular, if you find his interviews with people asking him about new stuff, he's pointed to things that other people have done that he admires, in areas like habit building, which he then talks about as something somewhat independent of the work he's doing. This allows him to continue "adapting" while still essentially "selling" the same product.

Newport has also talked a lot about how his perspective has changed through his various books. There are specific tools that he tends to find very helpful, but what often shifts is the perspective on their application (see the way he tracks changes in mindset from Depp Work to "A World without Email" and so forth). He's known for Timeblocking, but that's really only a small part of his whole approach to things. One thing he does which I particularly appreciate, is to provide a 4-box framework for categorizing the different ways people may like to approach getting into "Deep Work". Very often people think deep work only means one type of "long undivided attention," but Newport points out that there are a lot of different ways in which people get to that kind of thing.

I myself often do "time blocking" but on the scale of days and weeks rather than hours, which is the only way I can manage it. That's a type of thing Newport would be "fine" with, but if you just skimmed his work, you'd get the impression that such an approach might not be his cup of tea.

All of this to say that what people like Newport, Allen, and even Forster have managed to do is find a way to remain doggedly committed to consistency in ways that have netted them gains over time. This is something I've been homing in on recently, despite having seen it pointed out multiple times throughout my life.

Fundamentally, whether you phrase it as "being okay with being bored" or "being consistent" or whatever, I think it tends to be the case that behind all these systems where people succeed, you tend to find a degree of consistency, and I am beginning to hypothesize that this consistency is exactly the sort of thing that most people are trying to avoid while still achieving success (whatever that may mean to them). Or, put another way, they want to be stimulated and novelly, excitedly engaged all the time, but they want the success that comes only from consistency.

Forster has talked about this a lot (we're in the midst of the Lenten challenge after all!), but his constant changing of systems can hide the fact that under the hood, Forster himself has been pretty consistent in the way that he has approached his time management systems as well. Forster has seemed to consistently lean into trying to find mechanized, gamified ways of driving action without abandoning the feeling of choice, with a particular emphasis on trying to eliminate conscious "weighing one's choices" or conscious decision making. Or, to put it another way, "can I find a way of making a system to make it feel like the system is driving action instead of making it feel like I am driving action?" Maybe one could call it externalized manifestations of internal motivation.

If you look throughout Forster's work, I think something like this is a common theme, even though the form has changed a lot. And so even with Forster, there is perhaps more consistency than one might at first believe if you just look at his blog!

Of course, I think Forster is unique, as you point out, for being so willing to livestream his experiments all the time and publish his notes. That's something that neither Allen nor Newport do to the same degree.

Productivity Time Management System, also called 5T or 5/2. It's a no-list method, and probably the "standard" no-list method, since Mark Forster decided to put it into his book.