Get Everything Done

Since the end of the last Lenten Challenge I participated in, which was not the last one…
…I experimented a lot with what some call hyperscheduling, that is to fix your tasks in time in advance.

Some things worked better that way, than having lists of some sort. Other things seemed to make no sense at all. In many cases there is no logic in this, why you should schedule a particular item at that time slot and not the other, and so forth. Also new questions arose, e.g. what happens if you came late for five minutes to your own time block? Did you break your commitment?

When trying to figure out how to make all this work, I found that I just re-created DIT piece by piece. Which now makes me think that DIT is the best scheduling system minus one thing.

This one thing is that the Task Diary should primarily be filled with tasks for tomorrow. But I found that planning more in advance can help with being more efficient, more strategic if you will, and also in beating procrastination. If you have days to "acclimate" yourself with doing a specific task at a specific day, you are more likely to do it even if it is a high resistance task.

Other than that, DIT seemed to have it all together already.

For instance Deep Work.

Well, that's the Current Initiative. Work on that as long as you wish, every day. These time blocks that some promote are nice, but why would I want multiple "Deeps" on the same day? Doesn't make any sense.

The Current Initiative also covers all the quadrantastic Coveyisms that appear again and again in the discussion. The CI is your Superquadrant. It is your MIT. It is your Deep Work. It's all there.

In SOPP Mark supports this idea of doing the important first in order to contain busy work and by that to combat the problem of the Path of Least Resistance.

The CI has all that in it.

I also found that having time blocks for this or that can be a hindrance. There is this effect that work expands to the time given to it. I found for some tasks it's better to takle them and get them done as fast as possible. This may be just 10 minutes in one instance, but you allocated half an hour in your time blocks. Now what? Just cruising…

The Task Diary works better for that.

Yes, every task is scheduled, you have the upside of scheduling, which is, you know when something is done and you now what you are doing now and thus, what you are not doing now.

A per-workday list is sufficient to create that effect. There is now need to figure for every tasks how much time you need for that exactly.

Lastly, the Will Do List.

Yeah, that is mostly dealt with time blocking folks having re-occurring time blocks for "routines", without saying much further on the issue. These days all kinds of things are called "routines" often seen as a place where big victories ought to be won.

These days the Will Do List can be organised easily with a bunch of repeating reminders that some electronic beep-noise making entity creates for you. So on that level, the whole thing with 'em routines and such is a solved problem.

But I also found that nothing of that sort is necessary at all. Just be clear in your mind what you want it to be. Do you want a clear inbox daily? Etc.

The thing I found for me however is that I actually don't want to live like that at all. I just do that stuff here and there. A Long List is perfectly suited for that.

But of course you could just use the repeating beeps.

To make DIT more like time-blocking while still retaining the DIT supremacy over time blocks, there are two techniques I found.

One is to have strict start and end times for the CI, the Will Do List and the Task Diary. So your day consists of either 2 or 3 time blocks.

The other is to schedule the CIs in advance in the calendar. So you would now how many days you have for the CI and for future Initiatives.

Yes, so it"s DIT plus planning a bit more in advance. The other stuff I found in the discussion is not really improving anything, IMHO.

The exception would be, if you want to organize everything in the calendar, your DIT as time blocks and your regular appointments and -gasp- your routines.

But that would be more an organizational issue, not so much a question of what time management system you use.

While thinking about DIT, I could not help but notice that DIT could be seen as a pun on DID.

"Do it tomorrow!" equates to "I already DID it!" ;-)