Get Everything Done

This is really a set of questions (with some set-up) addressed to Mark, but I'd be interested in anyone else's experiences with addressing the same questions. So:


Dear Mark,

I've read both "How to Make Your Dreams Come True" and "Do It Tomorrow" quite closely, and benefited enormously from both; indeed, they're my two favourite books on personal development. I read "DIT" first, implemented many of its recommendations, and found it a great way of approaching things. For one thing, I've had no real email backlog for months now, which is the first time I can say that in more than 20 years (!) of using email.

The descriptions I read of "Dreams" seemed very intriguing, though, so I managed to get a rare copy of that, and I switched to the approach you set out in it roughly two months ago (though that's a bit misleading, as I was on vacation and then unwell for a few weeks in the middle). And that's been a great experience, too, in lots of ways. I've found the Goal Achievement Method astonishingly effective for helping me with short-term goals: getting the taxes done, writing a couple of reports I'd been putting off, and (most amazingly) getting onto a good sleep schedule, which has been quite a recalcitrant problem for me. At a more general level, I find it an exciting way of approaching life, and it feels very freeing, if a bit unnerving.

Although there are some commonalities (most obviously, the emphasis on having a clear vision), the two approaches seem to be clearly incompatible with one another in some straightforward ways. If I'm taking the DIT approach, I'll take care of yesterday's email today as a matter of principle, so to speak; if I'm taking the Dreams approach, I'll follow my feelings, and so may well not. So I'm faced with choosing between them, and that's where the questions come in.

First, why did you leave the Dreams approach behind? Did you personally find it lacking in certain ways? Or is it just that it doesn't work for everyone? You say on p. 11 of "DIT" that people tended not to implement the approach properly; but did it work for most people who did the structured work you recommend?

I also have a couple of questions about the internal workings of the two approaches. First, I find the daily self-coaching part of the Dreams approach difficult to maintain (unlike the "What was better about today?" list and regularly updating my long-term vision, both of which I enjoy). It often feels contrived or forced (although there have certainly been days on which I know it's been enormously helpful). Any advice about that?

Second, with regard to DIT: Isn't there a tension between the second and third principles (in chapter 2)? If I work on only one project at a time (apart from staying on top of my routine tasks), and work on that project little and often, then I'm not going to be doing much work on any given day: just a little bit of work on my current project, and my routine tasks. And that won't be very good for my productivity.

Anyway, I hope there isn't too much here. I'd be very interested, obviously, in anything you have to say about any of it.

Thanks,

Martin

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the response. My main question isn't about reconciling the approaches recommended in the two books, though, it's about choosing between them. (Sorry if I didn't make that clear.) Given that it seems that you've chosen the DIT approach over the Dreams approach, on the whole (although I know that you're constantly experimenting), I'm wondering what your reasons were, and whether you detected shortcomings in the Dreams approach that I might not have uncovered yet.

Perhaps what's implicit in your "two different authors" response is the thought that I should just continue experimenting with both and see which works better for me....

Thanks, in any case, for the link to the earlier blog post on projects.

Martin

Dear Mark,

Thanks, that's very helpful. And avoiding the New Age is fine by me.

I'll just keep experimenting and see if one sort of approach works better for me than the other. The Dreams approach has been working well recently, but as I'm an academic, I have fewer routine tasks to stay on top of in the summer, and it's easier to do what I want to do when I want to do it. It'll be interesting to see how things go when the academic year starts up again.

Thanks again for your responses,

Martin

Dear Mark,
I wonder if the Dreams/DIT approaches have something to do with the way differnet personality types approach things. What works and flows along for some people doesn't for others and vice versa. Certainly different approaches work at different times and in different circumstances, as Martin has discovered.
Gill

Hi Gill,

I suspect you're right about different approaches working best for different personality types. I tend to suffer from a fair bit of "demand resistance", so that even to-do (or will-do) lists I draw up myself quickly start to feel like external "shoulds" against which I feel a knee-jerk impulse to rebel (in order to assert my autonomy, I think). The same goes for appointments I make with myself – e.g., if I schedule some specific time into my calendar to exercise or to write. So one of the big attractions of the Dreams approach for me is that it circumvents all that internal struggle.

On the other hand, part of me is very attracted to structure, and to feeling in control, and that's the part that's more attracted to DIT. That part of me also has a hard time letting go in the way the Dreams approach requires.... But at the moment, the Dreams approach is working very well for me, so I'm sticking with it.

The semester's just starting up this week, so it'll be interesting to see how things go as my external circumstances shift gear.

Best,

Martin