Get Everything Done

I can't remember when I first found Mark's site, but I do remember his early email newsletter -- Yahoo-based? -- and always appreciated the way he thought different.

We could all cite specifics we learned from Mark's work -- the principles of little and often, progressive drafts, closed lists, how good am I feeling right now? -- but I think there are two things that strike me as the biggest lessons.

One is to trust that alchemical blend of rationality and emotion that is your 'intuition' -- that ineffable 'standing out' feeling that you can't touch but you know it when it happens. The tools he created leveraged that intuition and to me that's what makes his methods stand out from so many metrics-based productivity systems (though of course, he never ignored metrics; he always cited how many tasks done to how many undone).

And the greater lesson from that was to trust yourself. If you give a method a fair shake and it doesn't work, drop it. Find something that does resonate with you. Create one yourself and share it. It was always great fun to see Mark drop out early during the Lenten Challenges when his new method simply fell apart and he retreated to Autofocus or whatever; he always had a great humor about that.

For me, his greatest and most affecting book was "How to make your dreams come true." The methods he cites there but also the brilliance of a dialogue with your future self -- who else would have thought of such a thing? And those were the most brilliant and exciting parts of the book to me. And then his future self has a dialogue with *its* future self! Audacious!

Mark's methods and approaches always respected the messy human mind. The goal wasn't to make that mind more efficient and machine-like, it seems to me. It was to devise tools that help our minds create the things in the world that that they want to make. There's so much power in that and I'm so grateful to have been a part of that. This experience was wonderful and will never be repeated.

Were you by any chance "Mike De Bruyn" on Mark's Yahoo Group? If so, the earliest entry by you that I found in my email archive was from February 2009, but you probably were a member before I joined.

If you have any old email discussion threads or newsletter issues, I'd be interested.

Beautifully written, Mike Brown. Agree wholeheartedly on the Lenten challenge and the fun in seeing Mark test his new systems in it.

Trusting yourself was a bedrock principle of his. Seemingly simple, it has taken a long time for me to really live that out.

Maybe the littlest concept of Mark's that has helped me most is the notion "just get the file out."