Discussion Forum > Giving Re:Zero a good try
I would dearly love to make this system work - what better way of getting things done could there be than identifying items that you've created zero resistance to doing?
The only trouble is I have always had difficulty keeping the list trimmed (currently 115 items). As a result I am falling at the first hurdle and feeling resistance to looking at the list!
Aaron or anyone else using the system, how do you keep the list manageable? Or maybe 115 items isn't excessive after all? How many items do you get by on?
Any thoughts welcome.
IanS
The only trouble is I have always had difficulty keeping the list trimmed (currently 115 items). As a result I am falling at the first hurdle and feeling resistance to looking at the list!
Aaron or anyone else using the system, how do you keep the list manageable? Or maybe 115 items isn't excessive after all? How many items do you get by on?
Any thoughts welcome.
IanS
July 22, 2025 at 13:53 |
IanS
IanS
I am using a long list. I am trying to keep it to 150 items.
I number the items. New items need to get a number to stay on the list, and when I delete an item, that number becomes free for a new item. I start each month with a new notebook, and I start the list over, but as the month progresses it can get harder to limit the list. I find once the list gets to 200 items, it becomes be difficult to process and maintain.
I try to only have the list contain items for 7 days that have not been crossed out. The goal is to have all items crossed out by that time.
On the more recent pages, I try to cross out at least 3 items on a page each day.
I have not succeeded with Zero Resistance, as there are always items that I don't want to do that need to get done. They tend to be items that have remained on the list longer.
I have tried several methods to deal with the items on the list that are 4,5,6, 7 days old.
Yesterday I used a random number generator for those, which worked out well.
I also try to cross out a higher percentage for each day, and work on each remaining item longer as the 7 day limit approaches. The goal is to each day keep crossing off items on each active day. Usually the older pages will have 1,2, or 3 items on a page remaining.
However, there will sometimes be items that are longer than 7 days that I haven't crossed out. Sometimes, I will then rewrite it to another notebook for reference, or rewrite again on today's page, or I just cross them out. I could use a dismissal process. Unfortunately, although some of these items are someday/maybe items, others are procrastination items.
The Simple Scanning method is similar to the Zero Resistance in that there is no pressure to dismiss items, however I found that the long list gets too long to scan in a day.
Mark Forster also has a method of working in the order of greatest resistance, and it has occurred to me that his mind seems to work in opposites, so that perhaps one could alternate between Zero Resistance and greatest resistance. I will sometimes alternate between the most recent half of the list and older half of the list.
I find that the long list deals well with small reminders, daily routines, short term projects with only a few steps.
I number the items. New items need to get a number to stay on the list, and when I delete an item, that number becomes free for a new item. I start each month with a new notebook, and I start the list over, but as the month progresses it can get harder to limit the list. I find once the list gets to 200 items, it becomes be difficult to process and maintain.
I try to only have the list contain items for 7 days that have not been crossed out. The goal is to have all items crossed out by that time.
On the more recent pages, I try to cross out at least 3 items on a page each day.
I have not succeeded with Zero Resistance, as there are always items that I don't want to do that need to get done. They tend to be items that have remained on the list longer.
I have tried several methods to deal with the items on the list that are 4,5,6, 7 days old.
Yesterday I used a random number generator for those, which worked out well.
I also try to cross out a higher percentage for each day, and work on each remaining item longer as the 7 day limit approaches. The goal is to each day keep crossing off items on each active day. Usually the older pages will have 1,2, or 3 items on a page remaining.
However, there will sometimes be items that are longer than 7 days that I haven't crossed out. Sometimes, I will then rewrite it to another notebook for reference, or rewrite again on today's page, or I just cross them out. I could use a dismissal process. Unfortunately, although some of these items are someday/maybe items, others are procrastination items.
The Simple Scanning method is similar to the Zero Resistance in that there is no pressure to dismiss items, however I found that the long list gets too long to scan in a day.
Mark Forster also has a method of working in the order of greatest resistance, and it has occurred to me that his mind seems to work in opposites, so that perhaps one could alternate between Zero Resistance and greatest resistance. I will sometimes alternate between the most recent half of the list and older half of the list.
I find that the long list deals well with small reminders, daily routines, short term projects with only a few steps.
July 22, 2025 at 15:31 |
Mark H.
Mark H.
Ian S:
I think you have some great questions, and I think the question of the growth of the list is one of the primary problems that Mark has dealt with in the past and I suspect that's one of the core reasons that he never "landed" on a long list system that was good enough for him to write a book about the method (combined with other factors).
It's way too early to know how things will go for me, but I do think that I've never really had trouble with the length of the list before, but not because my lists didn't get long. Right now, it's only been a few days, and I have about 50 - 70 items scattered across 6 pages which each take about 25 - 28 items. That means an average of about 1/3 to 1/2 of the items on each page are crossed out at any given time. In the past, I've had plenty of items on the list, from 100 - 300 (I don't think I did 300 very often).
Here's a few thoughts that came up when I was reading through this thread.
I've been approaching resistance in a specific way to try to see if I can ensure that I actually make progress on the resistance question. The first thing I'm doing that I find very helpful is to fully embrace the "little and often" principle when working the list. I've found that my sense of resistance is highly correlated to the level of "completeness" that I think about achieving when I think about executing any given task. That means, especially since I work on often very challenging tasks that don't have right answers and for which there might not always be a strong sense of when "done" has been achieved, it's very important for me to calibrate my sense of resistance by embracing little and often.
What I mean by this is that when I first start the scan, I not only think "no resistance," but I also remind myself, "No resistance to just doing anything, no matter how small, on this task." This often turns into, "Do you really have any resistance to doing a trivial amount of work on this right now?"
I am operating under the theory (not yet proven) that tuning one's understanding and sensitivity to resistance is critical to progress. As I'm looking at it, resistance is not about whether I like a task, want to do the task, or even think that the task is important or valuable. There are lots of tasks for which my desire to do a task will never go up. I was reminded of that the other day. There are also lots of tasks which linger and which I am committed to doing, but which are inherently not the highest priority in my life. I have to either commit to doing them or let them go, and that means I can't use overall impact affect that calculation. I think it's easy to want zero resistance to equate to something like "I am excited or interested or want to do this thing." But I'm measuring it on a more neutral basis. I ask myself if I I really have that much resistance to just doing a little bit on that thing. I don't have to want to do it, just not have a specific resistance to it. This implies that I've also accepted the idea that I don't have to want to do everything I'm doing, it's fine to do something you don't want to do as long as you're neutral to it.
If I had to guess, holding to the idea that you should only ever have to do things that you want to do, and resistance being there because you think you should want to do the things you do, might be a big reason people have resistance. If you don't resist the idea of doing things you don't actively want to do, then I find there is less resistance in general.
When I ask the question this way, I often get a much clearer answer about why I'm resisting something. Often it will be, "It's not time for that yet." That's most common. Sometimes it is, "This is tedious," and I'm finding that little and often helps with that so far. What I don't find is, "I don't think this is worth doing." If I did find that, then I'd probably just delete that task, or confront the conflict directly, and actually dot the task to let myself stew on that conflict for a bit.
So, I'll dot a task as long as I have a net-zero resistance. I don't have to have a positive draw to doing it, but I at least don't want an active resistance. That means that a lot of things are essentially neutral, and the only thing that would typically keep me from doing it is the question nagging me in the back of my head, asking, is this really the best use of my time right now? At the moment, using this system, I'm allowing that question to be disregarded and just embracing taking action on these tasks. The end result is that some things are moving that might not have otherwise moved, which is kind of the point so far, since I actually like doing the things that are the big tasks for me.
The next big thing that I think makes a big difference with the length of the list is the acknowledgement of what a long list system is actually doing. Mark's big revelation with this a while back was the whole intuitive list processing thing he went through. One of the big elements of that is that the list is *not* supposed to be moved through at any specific pace, and it's not supposed to "get done." It's a suite of options for action, and it's supposed to help you decide in the moment what to do, but all real progress is in the present, not on the list, as it were. (This is my reinterpretation of Mark's original insights on this.) Thus, one doesn't have to really look at the list with negative emotion, because it doesn't represent anything but an undifferentiated potential set of futures, all of which you presumably included for one reason or another. There's no obligation, just potential.
Another way to frame this is that I would be unhappy if a long list system ended up with too little on it, because that means that I don't have options. The whole point is that there's always at least a little more on the list than you will ever be able to get done, because that means that you've always got saturation in the sense that there's always something new or next to do, so you never end up just sitting there with nothing to do. IMO, that's one of the good things about a long list system, because in other systems, I'll find myself sitting there for a little bit asking myself, "What's next?" and not having great systems to provide that to me in a low-effort way, whereas a long list provides an extremely low effort way to ensure that we always have something to think about doing, even if we don't actually do it.
But there is something that I thought about before I took on a long list system again related to the question of list growth. I examined Mark's methods on the basis of the three dimensions that Cal Newport has mentioned for a "Minimal Viable Productivity System." Newport argues that any good productivity system needs some mechanism for externalization of tasks, a way to address workload, and a way to manage time. Put another way, it's these three elements:
* Task Management
* Workload Management
* Time Management
The last, time management, is about intentionality of how you spend your time and what you're doing, rather than reacting to what other people want you to do.
I evaluated the overall approach to long lists and Re:Zero in particular to see how it addresses the above.
Any long list system is exceptionally good at the task management part, IMO. No other system makes it easier to get ideas out of your brain and the external environment and into a system to be processed in some way. It can easily scale up to hierarchical lists (master long list to smaller task lists) and so forth, so it's really ideal for this.
For time management, it's generally way more flexible and adaptive than a typical time blocking approach to time, because it's easier to change what you focus on at any given point, but it's not quite as intentional and focused as things like Ivy Lee/Eat the Frog or no-list systems. On the other hand, it ensures that you're always being intentional about how you spend your time, and putting you back into the driver's seat about spending your time the way that you want to. So, I'd say it's pretty good in this area.
But workload management is where long list systems are, IMO, probably less balanced, or less directly obviously useful. IMO, there has been less direct discussion regarding long list systems and how to use them to manage workload. They generally hide what they are doing in this regard, because they tend to help drive and prioritize what you care about intuitively, and in the background, instead of highlighting this in the same way that other systems would.
Mark has said before that no long list system will be able to help you get done more than you actually have time for. I suspect that even for Mark this is where the "oppressively long list" comes into play.
My interpretation so far, and perhaps why I haven't had issues with long lists per se, is that overly long lists that generate resistance are the long list signal that you have a workload imbalance in your life. It's the list's way of pushing you to acknowledge that your active workload and work-in-progress is too high for you to manage.
I will readily admit that I think this is easier for me to deal with, because I have the abundant luxury to be able to say no to a lot of things, so if I feel that there are too many things happening at once, I just have to look at some of them and say, "Not yet." I have way more things that I might want to do than I could ever do, and that's okay. I've embraced the idea of not doing a lot of things at once, and so I find it much easier now, almost too much, to be hyper focused on a smaller number of things.
So, I can have a lot of items on my list without ever feeling bad about not doing anything on them, because I know what my commitments are and I know whether I need to get to them yet or not. Each review of each item is my little mini-assessment about whether or not I think there's something here now or not.
If I do find some items a little oppressive, or they are there and nothing is happening on them or the list is getting a little long, then maybe I don't need to bother having those items around right now, and I can worry about them later. I ask myself whether they are really something I need to keep there, and then I feel fine deleting them. Often, it will be something speculative that I want to happen in the future, but it's clear that doing something on it now will take away from another project which I know is more important right now. I then choose to intentionally focus on one and not the other, and then if I'm afraid of letting it go, I'll put it on a list in the back of my notebook that I can look at if I ever really want to do so. I rarely do, but sometimes it is nice (maybe once very 6 months to a year).
Compared to Mark H above, then, I feel fine having items on my list that could be a month old or more. Since I don't feel the obligation to do anything on my items on my list, I don't worry about things that aren't moving on the list. I don't feel any obligation to make any progress on anything at all as long as I feel that the things that I am making progress on at any given moment are moving me in the right direction. Let the rest languish. I feel better just knowing that I can pick them up whenever I want to, and I won't forget about them in my head. That's enough for me.
So, pruning the list, for me, is more about just deciding that some things aren't ready to be done yet and letting them go. In my experience, I'll easily remember to add them back into the list in a year or two.
Anyways, that's my approach to long lists and workload management, where I can use the length of the list to help me manage my workload.
I still don't know if Re:Zero is going to work for me. But these are things I'm thinking about to help make it work for me.
I think you have some great questions, and I think the question of the growth of the list is one of the primary problems that Mark has dealt with in the past and I suspect that's one of the core reasons that he never "landed" on a long list system that was good enough for him to write a book about the method (combined with other factors).
It's way too early to know how things will go for me, but I do think that I've never really had trouble with the length of the list before, but not because my lists didn't get long. Right now, it's only been a few days, and I have about 50 - 70 items scattered across 6 pages which each take about 25 - 28 items. That means an average of about 1/3 to 1/2 of the items on each page are crossed out at any given time. In the past, I've had plenty of items on the list, from 100 - 300 (I don't think I did 300 very often).
Here's a few thoughts that came up when I was reading through this thread.
I've been approaching resistance in a specific way to try to see if I can ensure that I actually make progress on the resistance question. The first thing I'm doing that I find very helpful is to fully embrace the "little and often" principle when working the list. I've found that my sense of resistance is highly correlated to the level of "completeness" that I think about achieving when I think about executing any given task. That means, especially since I work on often very challenging tasks that don't have right answers and for which there might not always be a strong sense of when "done" has been achieved, it's very important for me to calibrate my sense of resistance by embracing little and often.
What I mean by this is that when I first start the scan, I not only think "no resistance," but I also remind myself, "No resistance to just doing anything, no matter how small, on this task." This often turns into, "Do you really have any resistance to doing a trivial amount of work on this right now?"
I am operating under the theory (not yet proven) that tuning one's understanding and sensitivity to resistance is critical to progress. As I'm looking at it, resistance is not about whether I like a task, want to do the task, or even think that the task is important or valuable. There are lots of tasks for which my desire to do a task will never go up. I was reminded of that the other day. There are also lots of tasks which linger and which I am committed to doing, but which are inherently not the highest priority in my life. I have to either commit to doing them or let them go, and that means I can't use overall impact affect that calculation. I think it's easy to want zero resistance to equate to something like "I am excited or interested or want to do this thing." But I'm measuring it on a more neutral basis. I ask myself if I I really have that much resistance to just doing a little bit on that thing. I don't have to want to do it, just not have a specific resistance to it. This implies that I've also accepted the idea that I don't have to want to do everything I'm doing, it's fine to do something you don't want to do as long as you're neutral to it.
If I had to guess, holding to the idea that you should only ever have to do things that you want to do, and resistance being there because you think you should want to do the things you do, might be a big reason people have resistance. If you don't resist the idea of doing things you don't actively want to do, then I find there is less resistance in general.
When I ask the question this way, I often get a much clearer answer about why I'm resisting something. Often it will be, "It's not time for that yet." That's most common. Sometimes it is, "This is tedious," and I'm finding that little and often helps with that so far. What I don't find is, "I don't think this is worth doing." If I did find that, then I'd probably just delete that task, or confront the conflict directly, and actually dot the task to let myself stew on that conflict for a bit.
So, I'll dot a task as long as I have a net-zero resistance. I don't have to have a positive draw to doing it, but I at least don't want an active resistance. That means that a lot of things are essentially neutral, and the only thing that would typically keep me from doing it is the question nagging me in the back of my head, asking, is this really the best use of my time right now? At the moment, using this system, I'm allowing that question to be disregarded and just embracing taking action on these tasks. The end result is that some things are moving that might not have otherwise moved, which is kind of the point so far, since I actually like doing the things that are the big tasks for me.
The next big thing that I think makes a big difference with the length of the list is the acknowledgement of what a long list system is actually doing. Mark's big revelation with this a while back was the whole intuitive list processing thing he went through. One of the big elements of that is that the list is *not* supposed to be moved through at any specific pace, and it's not supposed to "get done." It's a suite of options for action, and it's supposed to help you decide in the moment what to do, but all real progress is in the present, not on the list, as it were. (This is my reinterpretation of Mark's original insights on this.) Thus, one doesn't have to really look at the list with negative emotion, because it doesn't represent anything but an undifferentiated potential set of futures, all of which you presumably included for one reason or another. There's no obligation, just potential.
Another way to frame this is that I would be unhappy if a long list system ended up with too little on it, because that means that I don't have options. The whole point is that there's always at least a little more on the list than you will ever be able to get done, because that means that you've always got saturation in the sense that there's always something new or next to do, so you never end up just sitting there with nothing to do. IMO, that's one of the good things about a long list system, because in other systems, I'll find myself sitting there for a little bit asking myself, "What's next?" and not having great systems to provide that to me in a low-effort way, whereas a long list provides an extremely low effort way to ensure that we always have something to think about doing, even if we don't actually do it.
But there is something that I thought about before I took on a long list system again related to the question of list growth. I examined Mark's methods on the basis of the three dimensions that Cal Newport has mentioned for a "Minimal Viable Productivity System." Newport argues that any good productivity system needs some mechanism for externalization of tasks, a way to address workload, and a way to manage time. Put another way, it's these three elements:
* Task Management
* Workload Management
* Time Management
The last, time management, is about intentionality of how you spend your time and what you're doing, rather than reacting to what other people want you to do.
I evaluated the overall approach to long lists and Re:Zero in particular to see how it addresses the above.
Any long list system is exceptionally good at the task management part, IMO. No other system makes it easier to get ideas out of your brain and the external environment and into a system to be processed in some way. It can easily scale up to hierarchical lists (master long list to smaller task lists) and so forth, so it's really ideal for this.
For time management, it's generally way more flexible and adaptive than a typical time blocking approach to time, because it's easier to change what you focus on at any given point, but it's not quite as intentional and focused as things like Ivy Lee/Eat the Frog or no-list systems. On the other hand, it ensures that you're always being intentional about how you spend your time, and putting you back into the driver's seat about spending your time the way that you want to. So, I'd say it's pretty good in this area.
But workload management is where long list systems are, IMO, probably less balanced, or less directly obviously useful. IMO, there has been less direct discussion regarding long list systems and how to use them to manage workload. They generally hide what they are doing in this regard, because they tend to help drive and prioritize what you care about intuitively, and in the background, instead of highlighting this in the same way that other systems would.
Mark has said before that no long list system will be able to help you get done more than you actually have time for. I suspect that even for Mark this is where the "oppressively long list" comes into play.
My interpretation so far, and perhaps why I haven't had issues with long lists per se, is that overly long lists that generate resistance are the long list signal that you have a workload imbalance in your life. It's the list's way of pushing you to acknowledge that your active workload and work-in-progress is too high for you to manage.
I will readily admit that I think this is easier for me to deal with, because I have the abundant luxury to be able to say no to a lot of things, so if I feel that there are too many things happening at once, I just have to look at some of them and say, "Not yet." I have way more things that I might want to do than I could ever do, and that's okay. I've embraced the idea of not doing a lot of things at once, and so I find it much easier now, almost too much, to be hyper focused on a smaller number of things.
So, I can have a lot of items on my list without ever feeling bad about not doing anything on them, because I know what my commitments are and I know whether I need to get to them yet or not. Each review of each item is my little mini-assessment about whether or not I think there's something here now or not.
If I do find some items a little oppressive, or they are there and nothing is happening on them or the list is getting a little long, then maybe I don't need to bother having those items around right now, and I can worry about them later. I ask myself whether they are really something I need to keep there, and then I feel fine deleting them. Often, it will be something speculative that I want to happen in the future, but it's clear that doing something on it now will take away from another project which I know is more important right now. I then choose to intentionally focus on one and not the other, and then if I'm afraid of letting it go, I'll put it on a list in the back of my notebook that I can look at if I ever really want to do so. I rarely do, but sometimes it is nice (maybe once very 6 months to a year).
Compared to Mark H above, then, I feel fine having items on my list that could be a month old or more. Since I don't feel the obligation to do anything on my items on my list, I don't worry about things that aren't moving on the list. I don't feel any obligation to make any progress on anything at all as long as I feel that the things that I am making progress on at any given moment are moving me in the right direction. Let the rest languish. I feel better just knowing that I can pick them up whenever I want to, and I won't forget about them in my head. That's enough for me.
So, pruning the list, for me, is more about just deciding that some things aren't ready to be done yet and letting them go. In my experience, I'll easily remember to add them back into the list in a year or two.
Anyways, that's my approach to long lists and workload management, where I can use the length of the list to help me manage my workload.
I still don't know if Re:Zero is going to work for me. But these are things I'm thinking about to help make it work for me.
July 23, 2025 at 7:45 |
Aaron Hsu
Aaron Hsu
Aaron,
I read and listened (on the Chrome Read Aloud Extension) to your post.
Yes, it is curious why Mark Forster never wrote a book about using a long list. It seems that the long list method developed out of DIT, and was first called Autofocus. It was more flexible than DIT, and yet still had a dismissal procedure. So in DIT, after 4 days if the items were still not done, then they were dismissed, with a series of questions. But in Autofocus, all items on a page were dismissed if none of them were actioned when the page was scanned. I hardly ever did this however, so I was happy with the Simple Scanning method that didn't have dismissal, because that's what I was doing anyway.
However, dismissal was meant to prune the list, so without it the list could get too long to review in one day. When I go to a new notebook and start the list over, sometimes I am able to process all the items in the old notebook, but other times I just forget about the unactioned items on the old list, or review them a few more times.
One question I never got resolved is that Autofocus was meant as a catch-all list, and the same with its variations. Yet later Mark Forster seemed to only have items ready to be done or actually be worked on. And I have wondered what to do with those items not yet ready. I have tried keeping a separate list of new items. However, some of those would need to be done today, so now I am writing all the new items on the long list. Today's items will not remain on the list for long, so I will more likely to notice it. Yet a catch-all list is more likely to get too long.
The difference between DIT and Autofocus perhaps was also caused by the desire of Mark Forster to use "structured procrastination". Also, the arbitrary methods of the TM systems were perhaps created to make the decision of what to do next easier, and to gamify the process. It is true that with a long list there is always something to do, but how does one decide without getting decision fatigue?
Also, the long list here seems to mean that the work is done from the list. This seems to be needed to use structured procrastination. However, let's say that there is a master long list, and each day the master list is reviewed, and only items to be done today get transferred to the today's list. This is likely a good method, but Mark Forster never seemed to use this. Yet he also sometimes recommended rewriting items at the end of the list and crossing them out BEFORE they were actioned, which to me is similar, and this has the advantage of putting the items together and they can be worked on at the same time.
I have tried combining no-lists with a long list. This works out well, and provides a change from the long list, however, if I use short lists too much, I neglect the long list. It seems that the long list has to be reviewed at least once a day, and worked through once a day. I have tried to keep the limit of days that was used in DIT and DWM, and limit my list to 7 days.
I read and listened (on the Chrome Read Aloud Extension) to your post.
Yes, it is curious why Mark Forster never wrote a book about using a long list. It seems that the long list method developed out of DIT, and was first called Autofocus. It was more flexible than DIT, and yet still had a dismissal procedure. So in DIT, after 4 days if the items were still not done, then they were dismissed, with a series of questions. But in Autofocus, all items on a page were dismissed if none of them were actioned when the page was scanned. I hardly ever did this however, so I was happy with the Simple Scanning method that didn't have dismissal, because that's what I was doing anyway.
However, dismissal was meant to prune the list, so without it the list could get too long to review in one day. When I go to a new notebook and start the list over, sometimes I am able to process all the items in the old notebook, but other times I just forget about the unactioned items on the old list, or review them a few more times.
One question I never got resolved is that Autofocus was meant as a catch-all list, and the same with its variations. Yet later Mark Forster seemed to only have items ready to be done or actually be worked on. And I have wondered what to do with those items not yet ready. I have tried keeping a separate list of new items. However, some of those would need to be done today, so now I am writing all the new items on the long list. Today's items will not remain on the list for long, so I will more likely to notice it. Yet a catch-all list is more likely to get too long.
The difference between DIT and Autofocus perhaps was also caused by the desire of Mark Forster to use "structured procrastination". Also, the arbitrary methods of the TM systems were perhaps created to make the decision of what to do next easier, and to gamify the process. It is true that with a long list there is always something to do, but how does one decide without getting decision fatigue?
Also, the long list here seems to mean that the work is done from the list. This seems to be needed to use structured procrastination. However, let's say that there is a master long list, and each day the master list is reviewed, and only items to be done today get transferred to the today's list. This is likely a good method, but Mark Forster never seemed to use this. Yet he also sometimes recommended rewriting items at the end of the list and crossing them out BEFORE they were actioned, which to me is similar, and this has the advantage of putting the items together and they can be worked on at the same time.
I have tried combining no-lists with a long list. This works out well, and provides a change from the long list, however, if I use short lists too much, I neglect the long list. It seems that the long list has to be reviewed at least once a day, and worked through once a day. I have tried to keep the limit of days that was used in DIT and DWM, and limit my list to 7 days.
July 23, 2025 at 11:49 |
Mark H.
Mark H.
Mark:
I wonder at how different our working lives are! You talk about things being not ready, but still needing to be done today. That's a totally different timescale than I'm working at. For me, active might be something in the next 6 months to a year, rather than a day. I have some things on my list that I'm thinking about, but probably won't actively do anything on for at least a month or more. I suspect your list has significantly more "churn" than mine does.
I think the transition to talking about having stuff on your list that you "wanted to work on now" (at least in theory) happened near the time that dismissal started to go away. Technically, all the long list systems are still catch-all lists, but AF1 included dismissal mechanisms which were meant to ensure that things which ended up on the list but "weren't going anywhere" would be removed from the list via the system. Without that, you still need a way to trigger you to remove something on the list that is deadweight instead of helpful, and that's where I think the idea of letting go of things that aren't ready "yet" came in.
"However it is highly recommended that you keep your list well weeded. Tasks which are outdated, irrelevant or causing lack of focus should be deleted. It’s a good idea to keep “Weed list” as a task on your list." -- Mark Forster, re: FV's lack of dismissal
Another element is that MF's idea about the speed at which you go through the list suggested that a few times a day seemed to be good enough a lot of the time. Even with 200+ items on a list, I could manage to scan that many items 3 or 4 times in a day without feeling overwhelmed, personally.
"You should aim to go through the list three or more times on a normal day. Less than that will tend to be too slow-moving. Don’t put too many tasks into the preselect list, and remember the principle of 'little and often'." -- Mark Forster
And of course there's also this, regarding the length of the list:
"It’s not so much how many tasks that is the question, as how much time they represent. Some people like to write in a project as a lot of very small tasks, others prefer it as one big lump which they keep coming back to. Both approaches are equally valid, but obviously they affect the number of tasks on the list.
"The essential thing to watch out for is that you don’t have more work coming in than you are able to deal with. The easiest way to identify whether this is the case is to keep track of how many tasks are on the list and see of the number is growing. This should give you a pretty good pointer as to whether you are keeping up." -- Mark Forster
I think the shift from DIT to AF was primarily about starting to combine the mechanical elements of DIT with the intuitive elements of DREAMS. MF spoke before about wanting to leverage intuition more mechanically, and I think AF was the initial fruit of this effort. DIT is a highly rational system, while AF starts to move more processes into the background or tries to achieve results as the result of emergent behaviors arising from simple rules, rather than a complex rational process.
I think the concept of structured procrastination first came up in the FV system, or at least, this was the first system that I saw MF actively highlight as being meant to take advantage of structured procrastination. And of course, the question with long list systems has always been about figuring out a nice way to create structure and process for going through such a long list. That's the trade-off you make for having one big long list, which is very simple, but intentionally disorganized, which means you need a better process for handling that disorganization, if you want to gain the benefits that would usually be given to you from upfront categorization and processing.
MF has combined al ong list and a no-list method a few times. He wrote a while back on the use of NQ-FVP and its ability to cordon off the tail end as a method for creating a no-list temporarily. But he also used a system called 3T a while back while exploring no-list, and there he advocated feeding the 3T list using a master long list.
Personally, I think that things like FV and Re:Zero a more refined solutions to this same basic idea. The preselection of a chain is essentially creating a short action list like you would with a no-list. Mark even highlighted that FV is basically "systematic Next Hour".
I suspect that when it comes to workload management, the most important thing is to ensure that the list isn't generally growing forever, and that it stabilizes at some point. Even if that stabilization point is somewhere with lots and lots of items, if you are able to process the lists still, then you should be fine.
What I don't know is whether a long list system does anything to help provide an early warning sign to avoid overloading the list. This seems to be a classic problem with productivity systems, is that they don't fix the natural "greed" in people to push themselves beyond the healthy point into overwork becuase they feel like they can get away with it. Since most people's sense of overwork is only triggered after it is too late (because they only think to stop when they already feel overworked, which is too late by a long shot), I'm not sure if a long list system does anything to tell you, "Hey, we're keeping up nicely now, so *don't* start adding new stuff just because you're feeling good."
I wonder at how different our working lives are! You talk about things being not ready, but still needing to be done today. That's a totally different timescale than I'm working at. For me, active might be something in the next 6 months to a year, rather than a day. I have some things on my list that I'm thinking about, but probably won't actively do anything on for at least a month or more. I suspect your list has significantly more "churn" than mine does.
I think the transition to talking about having stuff on your list that you "wanted to work on now" (at least in theory) happened near the time that dismissal started to go away. Technically, all the long list systems are still catch-all lists, but AF1 included dismissal mechanisms which were meant to ensure that things which ended up on the list but "weren't going anywhere" would be removed from the list via the system. Without that, you still need a way to trigger you to remove something on the list that is deadweight instead of helpful, and that's where I think the idea of letting go of things that aren't ready "yet" came in.
"However it is highly recommended that you keep your list well weeded. Tasks which are outdated, irrelevant or causing lack of focus should be deleted. It’s a good idea to keep “Weed list” as a task on your list." -- Mark Forster, re: FV's lack of dismissal
Another element is that MF's idea about the speed at which you go through the list suggested that a few times a day seemed to be good enough a lot of the time. Even with 200+ items on a list, I could manage to scan that many items 3 or 4 times in a day without feeling overwhelmed, personally.
"You should aim to go through the list three or more times on a normal day. Less than that will tend to be too slow-moving. Don’t put too many tasks into the preselect list, and remember the principle of 'little and often'." -- Mark Forster
And of course there's also this, regarding the length of the list:
"It’s not so much how many tasks that is the question, as how much time they represent. Some people like to write in a project as a lot of very small tasks, others prefer it as one big lump which they keep coming back to. Both approaches are equally valid, but obviously they affect the number of tasks on the list.
"The essential thing to watch out for is that you don’t have more work coming in than you are able to deal with. The easiest way to identify whether this is the case is to keep track of how many tasks are on the list and see of the number is growing. This should give you a pretty good pointer as to whether you are keeping up." -- Mark Forster
I think the shift from DIT to AF was primarily about starting to combine the mechanical elements of DIT with the intuitive elements of DREAMS. MF spoke before about wanting to leverage intuition more mechanically, and I think AF was the initial fruit of this effort. DIT is a highly rational system, while AF starts to move more processes into the background or tries to achieve results as the result of emergent behaviors arising from simple rules, rather than a complex rational process.
I think the concept of structured procrastination first came up in the FV system, or at least, this was the first system that I saw MF actively highlight as being meant to take advantage of structured procrastination. And of course, the question with long list systems has always been about figuring out a nice way to create structure and process for going through such a long list. That's the trade-off you make for having one big long list, which is very simple, but intentionally disorganized, which means you need a better process for handling that disorganization, if you want to gain the benefits that would usually be given to you from upfront categorization and processing.
MF has combined al ong list and a no-list method a few times. He wrote a while back on the use of NQ-FVP and its ability to cordon off the tail end as a method for creating a no-list temporarily. But he also used a system called 3T a while back while exploring no-list, and there he advocated feeding the 3T list using a master long list.
Personally, I think that things like FV and Re:Zero a more refined solutions to this same basic idea. The preselection of a chain is essentially creating a short action list like you would with a no-list. Mark even highlighted that FV is basically "systematic Next Hour".
I suspect that when it comes to workload management, the most important thing is to ensure that the list isn't generally growing forever, and that it stabilizes at some point. Even if that stabilization point is somewhere with lots and lots of items, if you are able to process the lists still, then you should be fine.
What I don't know is whether a long list system does anything to help provide an early warning sign to avoid overloading the list. This seems to be a classic problem with productivity systems, is that they don't fix the natural "greed" in people to push themselves beyond the healthy point into overwork becuase they feel like they can get away with it. Since most people's sense of overwork is only triggered after it is too late (because they only think to stop when they already feel overworked, which is too late by a long shot), I'm not sure if a long list system does anything to tell you, "Hey, we're keeping up nicely now, so *don't* start adding new stuff just because you're feeling good."
July 23, 2025 at 17:33 |
Aaron Hsu
Aaron Hsu
> This seems to be a classic problem with productivity systems, is that they don't fix the natural "greed" in people to push themselves beyond the healthy point into overwork becuase they feel like they can get away with it.
MF always said you should have start- and stopping times for your work with a long list or any other system to manage your discretionary time.
In DREAMS there is the vision as the focal point for your work. Then in DIT having a vision is one of the guiding principles.
In SOPP and in DIT the notion of commitments as the source of tasks and advice to pruning your commitments.
These three elements: working hours schedule, a vision to work towards to, a clear picture of one's commitments act as boundaries against 'the natural "greed"'.
Sure, there are some maintenance tasks that are obvious e.g. "email" but other than that, the first tasks on your list should be "develop, clarify and update personal life vision" and "create list of commitments and get rid of as many as possible of them".
The source of that greed is at least partially fuelled by FOMO and that stems from a lack of commitment on the vision level. Which of your dreams(!) are you committed to to make real? Meaning, the other eight ways of conquering the world that you thought might be fun, belong into your cabinet of curiosities. Until you are ready to trash them entirely…
Regarding the mechanics of a "weed list" task, weeding something out doesn't necessarily mean to just delete the item. If the Long List is "catch-all" it means a lot of that stuff just goes to reference material in GTD parlance. Cal Newport talks about maintaining idea lists and the need to update them regularly. Ideas in the sense of topical themes as underlying material for writing. These types of things would naturally appear on the Long List first.
MF always said you should have start- and stopping times for your work with a long list or any other system to manage your discretionary time.
In DREAMS there is the vision as the focal point for your work. Then in DIT having a vision is one of the guiding principles.
In SOPP and in DIT the notion of commitments as the source of tasks and advice to pruning your commitments.
These three elements: working hours schedule, a vision to work towards to, a clear picture of one's commitments act as boundaries against 'the natural "greed"'.
Sure, there are some maintenance tasks that are obvious e.g. "email" but other than that, the first tasks on your list should be "develop, clarify and update personal life vision" and "create list of commitments and get rid of as many as possible of them".
The source of that greed is at least partially fuelled by FOMO and that stems from a lack of commitment on the vision level. Which of your dreams(!) are you committed to to make real? Meaning, the other eight ways of conquering the world that you thought might be fun, belong into your cabinet of curiosities. Until you are ready to trash them entirely…
Regarding the mechanics of a "weed list" task, weeding something out doesn't necessarily mean to just delete the item. If the Long List is "catch-all" it means a lot of that stuff just goes to reference material in GTD parlance. Cal Newport talks about maintaining idea lists and the need to update them regularly. Ideas in the sense of topical themes as underlying material for writing. These types of things would naturally appear on the Long List first.
July 24, 2025 at 12:32 |
Christopher
Christopher
Many good thoughts here, thanks. I am doing a number of these tips already, although some I still have difficulty with.
Aaron,
I started on a thread on "structured procrastination" here a while ago:
http://markforster.squarespace.com/forum/post/2796850#post2796956
and I referred to the Autofocus instructions where "structured procrastination" is mentioned.
http://markforster.squarespace.com/forum/post/2796850#post2796956
also in this thread on Mark's influences, Mark Forster has a post on "structural procrastination" as a method of handling resistance, and also mentions Zero Resistance.
Aaron,
I started on a thread on "structured procrastination" here a while ago:
http://markforster.squarespace.com/forum/post/2796850#post2796956
and I referred to the Autofocus instructions where "structured procrastination" is mentioned.
http://markforster.squarespace.com/forum/post/2796850#post2796956
also in this thread on Mark's influences, Mark Forster has a post on "structural procrastination" as a method of handling resistance, and also mentions Zero Resistance.
July 25, 2025 at 4:53 |
Mark H.
Mark H.
Mark:
Thanks for the structured procrastination stuff. I had forgotten about that section in the AF instructions!
Thanks for the structured procrastination stuff. I had forgotten about that section in the AF instructions!
July 25, 2025 at 5:49 |
Aaron Hsu
Aaron Hsu
http://markforster.squarespace.com/forum/post/2794290#post2794305.
I forgot to put the link to MF on zero resistance and structured procrastination. It is somewhere on this page about MF influences.
I forgot to put the link to MF on zero resistance and structured procrastination. It is somewhere on this page about MF influences.
July 25, 2025 at 15:49 |
Mark H.
Mark H.
Since there was a question about the length of the list growing, I thought I would share my current statistics.
I now have 62 tasks spread over 12 active pages where each page can hold 26 tasks.
At the moment, I'm not finding it hard to scan through the list at all.
I'm also finding that, at least for now, there is a very distinct relaxing and releasing effect of having a single source of all possible obligations and "stuff to do" in a place that I can just review simply. Comparing this to no-list or Time Surfing, one of the main sources of strain I found was the tendency to have more varied sources of choice, and sometimes having confidence that the next thing you think about doing is the right one caused more emotional strain than one might expect. Having everything in one big list produces a very distinct and surprisingly strong emotional release from this, resulting in a strong sense of relaxation with respect to "what *can* I do next" type questions.
Of course, the trade-off, traditionally, has been that scanning cost, but we'll see how that progresses. So far, I'm not feeling "frustrated" with the list yet.
I now have 62 tasks spread over 12 active pages where each page can hold 26 tasks.
At the moment, I'm not finding it hard to scan through the list at all.
I'm also finding that, at least for now, there is a very distinct relaxing and releasing effect of having a single source of all possible obligations and "stuff to do" in a place that I can just review simply. Comparing this to no-list or Time Surfing, one of the main sources of strain I found was the tendency to have more varied sources of choice, and sometimes having confidence that the next thing you think about doing is the right one caused more emotional strain than one might expect. Having everything in one big list produces a very distinct and surprisingly strong emotional release from this, resulting in a strong sense of relaxation with respect to "what *can* I do next" type questions.
Of course, the trade-off, traditionally, has been that scanning cost, but we'll see how that progresses. So far, I'm not feeling "frustrated" with the list yet.
July 30, 2025 at 18:11 |
Aaron Hsu
Aaron Hsu
I am just now in the process of finishing my notebook for July and preparing my notebook for August. I use a 200 page composition book. It took one hour to prepare the August notebook.
I maintain the equivalent of a long list for the month, but sometimes process each page, or each day, or the whole list.
I start on the first day of the month to number each item, starting with the number 1. For a few days, I phase out the previous month, sometimes crossing out every item, but other times just leaving the items go.
I find that the first 100 items and the first week go smoothly, and there is a good flow. I find that just keeping one list at this point, without dividing into new, started, etc. goes quicker.
I keep track of how many items are not numbered - these are new items.
However, the list might grow to 150 items, and I try to maintain the list to no more than 7 days.
By the third week or so, if the list grows to 200 items, it becomes harder to maintain.
The list tends to grow, because if you do one item, it might generate two or three more items.
So as the month ends, I have good incentive to weed the list.
I am finding that I have 25 new projects that have not been started, and about 22 that are stalled.
I transferred these to the August notebook to determine how to deal with them.
I don't think the "little and often" approach and a long list is as good to deal with these type of projects. They tend to be projects I don't want to do, or I find difficult. And I have more projects than I can deal with.
I do wonder if these projects need a different type of method/system.
Perhaps I need to "sit" with them, as some have suggested here, or meditate on them, or go through the dismissal questions. Or put them through a personal kanban.
I maintain the equivalent of a long list for the month, but sometimes process each page, or each day, or the whole list.
I start on the first day of the month to number each item, starting with the number 1. For a few days, I phase out the previous month, sometimes crossing out every item, but other times just leaving the items go.
I find that the first 100 items and the first week go smoothly, and there is a good flow. I find that just keeping one list at this point, without dividing into new, started, etc. goes quicker.
I keep track of how many items are not numbered - these are new items.
However, the list might grow to 150 items, and I try to maintain the list to no more than 7 days.
By the third week or so, if the list grows to 200 items, it becomes harder to maintain.
The list tends to grow, because if you do one item, it might generate two or three more items.
So as the month ends, I have good incentive to weed the list.
I am finding that I have 25 new projects that have not been started, and about 22 that are stalled.
I transferred these to the August notebook to determine how to deal with them.
I don't think the "little and often" approach and a long list is as good to deal with these type of projects. They tend to be projects I don't want to do, or I find difficult. And I have more projects than I can deal with.
I do wonder if these projects need a different type of method/system.
Perhaps I need to "sit" with them, as some have suggested here, or meditate on them, or go through the dismissal questions. Or put them through a personal kanban.
July 30, 2025 at 20:54 |
Mark H.
Mark H.
I have at other times put the new items in the back of the notebook on a separate list. Some of the new items have been short term tasks - these should probably be on the long list.
What I could do in August is to feed from the list of new projects and stalled projects to the long list one at a time.
It could be that some projects don't lend themselves to the "little and often" approach, and need more time and a different mode, maybe time blocking.
What I could do in August is to feed from the list of new projects and stalled projects to the long list one at a time.
It could be that some projects don't lend themselves to the "little and often" approach, and need more time and a different mode, maybe time blocking.
July 30, 2025 at 21:14 |
Mark H.
Mark H.
So if I have 25 new projects and 22 stalled, totaling 47, and 200 items are more than I can maintain, then the maximum number of items should be around 150 items.
If one uses the long list as a catch-all list, then more of these items will remain on the list. In effect one is putting off the process of processing them.
One can put these items on another list for reference, or a Someday/Maybe list.
However, some of these I am just procrastinating on, or they are time-consuming.
So I am wondering if these projects need to graduate to another system.
If one uses the long list as a catch-all list, then more of these items will remain on the list. In effect one is putting off the process of processing them.
One can put these items on another list for reference, or a Someday/Maybe list.
However, some of these I am just procrastinating on, or they are time-consuming.
So I am wondering if these projects need to graduate to another system.
July 30, 2025 at 21:27 |
Mark H.
Mark H.
I am inclined to think that these new and stalled projects need to be dealt with one at a time, and on a different track than on the long list.
July 30, 2025 at 21:33 |
Mark H.
Mark H.
Survived a little dip in desire to use the list, mostly because I was trying to revert to a bad habit. The conflict was an interesting one.
I am noticing in my work with Re:Zero that I am not at all as resistant to scanning the whole list as I would have thought. The reason is that I feel like I have a very good control over the size of the chain on any given pass, and the fact that I go through the whole list means that on each iteration, I have the ability to "do anything", which makes it feel less ponderous.
I think going through the entire list all the time also means that I have a very strong sense of the list, and so I don't feel that the list gets that stale. This is a weird effect, because I found that the list felt a lot more annoying to work with in FVP or Simple Scanning simply because I didn't feel like I had a handle on the whole list the whole time. This is not something that I would have expected. It's weird that reviewing the whole list would ironically make it feel easier to use the list.
I *am* seeing the promised effect of a much faster reduction in resistance to things, so much so that it almost triggers my concern that I'm starting on things *too* early. However, this seems to be working so far in that respect.
In comparing this to FV, which is the most similar system, and which I didn't get on with nearly as well, I think not having to dot the first task on the list has a shockingly outsized effect on my ability to use the list. For some reason, I feel much more contented with the work that I'm accomplishing on the list compared to if I were working an FV list. I suspect the reason for this is that I often have speculative items on the list which I know I want to get to, and I want to think about, but which are not ready to be done yet at all, and which possibly won't be ready to be done for a while. I am happy to leave these items for a relatively long time on the list, but FV will have a tendency to force or compel action on those items earlier than I really want, while Re:Zero allows me to let those items comfortably languish on the list for much longer, while still having a strong sense of the list as a whole.
Overall, I'm finding this method oddly effective still, even after the initial grace period. I do think that having a background in using the Time Surfing method has helped to provide a kind of philosophical framework on the list that makes it easier to process certain meta-aspects of the list.
I am noticing in my work with Re:Zero that I am not at all as resistant to scanning the whole list as I would have thought. The reason is that I feel like I have a very good control over the size of the chain on any given pass, and the fact that I go through the whole list means that on each iteration, I have the ability to "do anything", which makes it feel less ponderous.
I think going through the entire list all the time also means that I have a very strong sense of the list, and so I don't feel that the list gets that stale. This is a weird effect, because I found that the list felt a lot more annoying to work with in FVP or Simple Scanning simply because I didn't feel like I had a handle on the whole list the whole time. This is not something that I would have expected. It's weird that reviewing the whole list would ironically make it feel easier to use the list.
I *am* seeing the promised effect of a much faster reduction in resistance to things, so much so that it almost triggers my concern that I'm starting on things *too* early. However, this seems to be working so far in that respect.
In comparing this to FV, which is the most similar system, and which I didn't get on with nearly as well, I think not having to dot the first task on the list has a shockingly outsized effect on my ability to use the list. For some reason, I feel much more contented with the work that I'm accomplishing on the list compared to if I were working an FV list. I suspect the reason for this is that I often have speculative items on the list which I know I want to get to, and I want to think about, but which are not ready to be done yet at all, and which possibly won't be ready to be done for a while. I am happy to leave these items for a relatively long time on the list, but FV will have a tendency to force or compel action on those items earlier than I really want, while Re:Zero allows me to let those items comfortably languish on the list for much longer, while still having a strong sense of the list as a whole.
Overall, I'm finding this method oddly effective still, even after the initial grace period. I do think that having a background in using the Time Surfing method has helped to provide a kind of philosophical framework on the list that makes it easier to process certain meta-aspects of the list.
August 6, 2025 at 20:04 |
Aaron Hsu
Aaron Hsu
* I wanted a pen and paper system to play with that would let me "gamify" or play with a system more externally with my pens and inks
* I wanted to see if I could simplify reminders and system down so that all my thoughts and ideas about future work were consolidated into a single source (the long list)
* I am having a really hard time with resistance at the moment, which means that it's a perfect time to see if Re:Zero does what it aims to do
* I wanted to play with more structure in my life to see if that would affect how I dealt with routines
* I feel like I needed something to help deal with "boring stuff" a little bit better
* I wanted to see how much I actually like having external systems versus internal ones
I continue to struggle with implementing anything remotely close to an actual schedule or routine, even knowing that I can adapt it. I'm not sure why, except that whenever I make a schedule, I never come close to following it. I think there's a strong disconnect between various parts of my being on that one. I do find an Ivy Lee style prioritized list is workable without much difficulty, but I am finding it hard to create the appropriate balance across all areas of my life with that, so I am seeing whether a Forster long list will make that easier, and how that changes my focus.
Should be an interesting experiment! So far, I'm finding it somewhat challenging to get in touch with that sense of Zero Resistance, but it's still working, nonetheless.