Get Everything Done

The chains in these systems are meant to be relatively short (whatever that means for you). Moreover, if you ask yourself if you have zero resistance, for instance, and find yourself selecting too many things, then you probably aren't actually asking what you have zero resistance to doing *right now*.

More likely, you're asking yourself if you have zero resistance to doing that thing "today" or "in a minute" or "when I get to it on the chain." That's the wrong way to think about the questions.

The chains can spread across the entire spread of all active pages on the list. You won't lose your place, because you scan backwards to action items. Unless you miss a dotted item because you were scanning backwards too fast, you won't lose your place.

The long scan *does* take a little bit of time. That's part of the system. It shouldn't take a very long time, but a minute or two to go through the list to make the chain is not surprising. These scans should be intuitive and rapid.

Additionally, Mark's long list systems have always intended to be the sifting ground for new ideas, and they are always meant to have primarily your active commitments on them. They are time management, not project management tools.

One of Mark's biggest insights was the idea that once you have committed to doing something, there really isn't any sense in prioritizing those things. They all have to get done, and since they all have to get done, driving by urgency in terms of when you need to get started is probably the best solution. The question isn't about importance, but about commitment to doing.

Mark's long list systems all implicitly work with this idea of not prioritizing on the basis of importance, but having a means of leveraging urgency and commitment. The original long list systems had dismissal protocols explicitly built in to the system. The whole idea of these dismissal protocols was to allow you to run the system and have it discard things that were not active. The intent was that they would home in on your actual active commitments and discard the rest.

The latter systems such as FV, FVP, Re:Zero, etc. did away with explicit dismissal in favor of incorporating dismissal as a habit. The idea was that as you were reviewing your list, you would be pruning items out of it over time, intuitively. You'd still be dismissing items that weren't going anywhere or that weren't going to go anywhere, thus keeping your list representing the active frontier of your life, but there wasn't an explicit protocol for it.

In all of these systems, there's no such thing as "parking items for later". Mark explicitly thought that things like that, such as Someday/Maybe lists, were probably less effective than people thought they were, and that such parked lists of things always got stale. Instead, Mark's systems always favored entering items into the system when they came to you and when you wanted to consider them. They would go into the long list first, and then get weeded out over time.

Again, these systems are time management systems, not idea archives. They can be used to do thinking and questioning and the like, but those are active things, not ideas for the future. Instead, if you really want to have ideas for the future parked someplace, such as a list of blog posts to write, then you might have "write blog post" on your long list, but then have a project file somewhere that contains all the blog post ideas that you can choose from. You *could* put all those blog posts into your main list, but having a bunch of items that you intentionally know you aren't going to consider working on and that aren't really choices for what you can do right now defeats the point of a time management system like the long list.

I hope this helps clarify some elements of long lists!