Get Everything Done

I am working with ChatGPT to construct a timeline of Mark Forster's ideas.

It looks like the first blog entry was
Vague Goals
Date Thursday, August 10, 2006 at 11:47

And the first forum thread
overcommitted
by sharkey
1 December 9, 2006 at 9:52

ChatGPT is trying to place the book "The Pathway to Awesomeness" which was published in 2013, but contains blog posts from 2006-2007. It would like to put it between Do it Tomorrow (2006) and Autofocus (2008), serving as a bridge between the two.

Here is an outline of the order that it has:

1. Get Everything Done — early era, ~2000
2. How to Make Your Dreams Come True (Dreams) — ~2002
3. Do It Tomorrow (DIT) — 2006
4. The Pathway to Awesomeness (collection of early blog posts) — published 2013; essays written ~2006–2007
5. Autofocus (development & popularization) — around 2008–2010
6. Final Version / FVP (iterations / refinements) — post-Autofocus, ~2010–2014
7. Secrets of Productive People — 2015
8. Simple Scanning — 2017 (formal writeup/blog)
9. Zero Resistance & later blog experiments — 2020s (e.g., 2022 post)

Do you think this order is correct? Should there be any additions?
I am just giving the outline; ChatGPT gives charts, and analysis, and comparisons, arcs, etc. Some of this I have posted before (although different chats will give different slants.) But I want to make sure these facts at least are correct.

Personal preference, but for me it feels weird to put a book published in 2013 earlier in the timeline. I'd rather place the individual original essays at their correct position and have the book sit in 2013 and mention that it collects earlier works.

The opening of the Preface to The Pathway to Awesomeness, page 6:

"This selection of articles from my Get Everything Done blog covers a wide variety of
articles relating to achievement, vision, and self-organization. They are not designed to
add up to a systematic way of running one’s life. If you want that, then try my books Get
Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play, How to Make Your Dreams Come True and
Do It Tomorrow. The articles in this ebook are designed to provide ideas to spark your
own creativity."

And on the blog, NEWS FLASH: New E-Book To Be Published on Monday!, Saturday, October 12, 2013 at 10:48

"The Pathway to Awesomeness: How to Get Things Done and Live a Productive Life, a selection of the best posts from a decade’s worth of my blog and newsletter will be published as an e-book on Monday, October 14th."

I count 42 articles in the book. The articles are dated.

These are the number of articles for each year:

2006 - 19
2007 - 14
2008 - 3
2009 - 2
2010 - 0
2011 - 0
2012 - 4
There is a short conclusion without a date. Perhaps that was written in 2013.

So although most of the articles come from 2006-2007, there a few from other years.

ChatGPT finds in these articles 7 core concepts that are the foundation for the systems that came later (and I think this is likely true), and lists what they are, and the section it comes from. But when I asked it to provide a quotation to support this, it gave me a quotation for each, but I could not find them in the text. It admitted it was not an exact quotation, but it was a paraphrase that summarized the idea. I am asking it again for an exact quotation.

ChatGPT is giving me exact quotations now. I will post it in a different thread.

I went back to ChatGPT and asked it to correct the timeline, however it then omitted something else.
ChatGPT had a paragraph summary of Mark Forster's career, and then had a paragraph on each point in the timeline, in line with the thought of the summary. I just took the heading of each paragraph and posted it here. This looks accurate, with the exception that perhaps The Pathway to Awesomeness could be positioned later.
However, I cannot vouchsafe for the accuracy of ChatGPT. I need to constantly correct it. It will take thoughts from a book, and I find out it is not by Mark Forster; it will quote from page numbers of a Mark Forster book, and when I can't find it, it will admit that it is a paraphrase. Sometimes it mixes up Mark Forster's systems.

It has a framework for viewing Mark Forster's systems. In the Autofocus instructions, Mark Forster says that the system balances the "rational" and "intuitive". He repeats that in his video showing him using Autofocus. ChatGPT then interprets the rest of the systems in light of that. So that GED is more rational, the Dreams book is more intuitive, DIT is more rational, Autofocus seeks to have a balance between rational and intuitive. And so on. So ChatGPT sees an oscillation between these two poles, with some systems leaning toward one pole or the other, or have more a balance.

This could be correct, and it is an interesting hypothesis or theory. But I would rather have Mark Forster's word on it that it was his intention, which it could have been. However, when he is reviewing his system, he had specific criteria for evaluating and judging his own systems, so he did reflect on this.

I have posted some other ChatGPT's analyses, and was hoping that Mark Forster would notice it and correct it or endorse it, but that was not the case.

I wonder too if posting AI-generated text on online forums is really helpful to encourage people to post. So I am reluctant to post it publicly. I did give the gist of what ChatGPT said, but it is also good at making stuff up, and speculating, and finding connections beyond the facts, so we need to careful with it.

On the other hand, my chats with ChatGPT has helped me a great deal in understanding Mark Forster better. I am able to take from it what I want, and filter out what I don't agree with.

Right now, perhaps with others, I am trying to determine what is Mark Forster's message over the years with varying systems, which you can see from the timeline.

I feel like I have been waiting since Mark Forster's last post like a disciple for the teacher's return, or the final message of an Eastern mystic-guru before departing. So I feel left hanging, and over the last few months I have been dialoguing with ChatGPT as a substitute. It has an overall pattern to his career, which has helped me. However, in the midst of the most brilliant analyses, ChatGPT is not consistent, and makes errors. After giving me the timeline as above, it later displaced two items and put them in the wrong chronological order, and I had to correct it.

Also, since this an online forum where we human beings contribute our personal thinking, it seems unfair to post lengthy texts from AI - which can generate in a few seconds what would take for us hours to write.

However, its conclusion might help others, so I will quote briefly:

<Instead of forming a straight line of “progress,” his work oscillates between two poles:
(1) Rational / Structured / Closed / Disciplinary and
(2) Intuitive / Open / Flow / Self-directed.>

<The enduring thread is not any one method, but the process of balancing resistance and flow, structure and spontaneity.>

<Forster oscillates between the structured and the intuitive: structure → vision → strict daily structure → intuition/flow → refined intuition → toolkit → minimal intuition → inner alignment.>

<The constant thread: emphasis on psychology of action (resistance, readiness, intuition), not on building a single monolithic methodology.>

I want to specially thank Aaron Hsu, who wrote and posted an excellent history of the evolution of Mark Forster's thinking, which I used as the basis for the ChatGPT chat. Occasionally ChatGPT will mention Aaron by name.

If Aaron would like to add or polish to what he wrote, I am sure it would be interesting.

Rather than oscillating between two poles, I would say that Mark's work aimed towards an intuitive system: one that was structured in a way that gave room for intuition.

Teckwyn,

Thanks for your post.

Perhaps the word "oscillation" is not clear because I didn't post ChatGPT's entire message. I didn't because I am not sure whether it is true or not. It is more speculative, which isn't necessarily wrong, but there could be room for disagreement.

It refers to the history of his systems, that some lean more toward structure, and others lean toward intuition, with varying degrees of balance between the two.

Yes, I agree with you that he was trying to provide enough structure to allow for intuition.

I noticed that in the timeline that a period of time is missing.

I don't see the No-List methods.
Although the Secrets book uses the No-list method of 5T, there are other no-list methods that are listed on the website on the Full List of Official No-List Systems.
http://markforster.squarespace.com/forum/post/2612782

These were created by Mark Forster mostly in the year 2016.
The 3T method can be found as early as 2010.
There was discussion on the forum in 2015 about the 5T method, which appeared in the Secrets book.

After experimenting with various No-List methods, he had a series of blog posts in the year 2017, where he rethought long lists, which eventually let to the long list of Simple Scanning.

Regarding oscillation in Mark Forster's systems:

There might be consensus on the earlier years.
So
Get Everything Done leaned toward the Rational/Structured
Dreams book leaned toward the Intuitive/Open
DIT leaned toward the Rational/Structured
So perhaps here there was oscillation.

Then Autofocus sought to have a balance between the rational and intuitive. This is stated in his instructions.

After that he might revisit ideas and method, and combine them in different ways, or modify them. Perhaps then he was favoring intuition and finding enough structure to go along with it.

So for example in this post he found two no-list methods in his earlier book Get Everything Done.
http://markforster.squarespace.com/fv-forum/post/2764356#post2766142

He later returned to these, and likely used these as the basis for other methods.