Get Everything Done

Mark

Having read of the other posts and from my own personal observations after 2 days I am experiencing some issues with the system that I do believe will sort themselves out over time.

I work as a Corporate IT Manager and much of my work day is pre-scheduled with meetings and 121s with the directs. As such my "processing windows" are limited. I currently have 4 pages of actions and today I only got to the second page. (However, I did a number of actions and would call it a successful day)

I think this is telling me 2 things:- I need more personal processing time (and yes this has gone onto my list) but also that it will take a period of time for the system to callibrate itself. I have read your post on speed of movement and I would not be at all suprised if the auto-focussing does not take me through the lists a whole lot quicker on the next couple of days so that I experience the value of multiple passes despite still having limited time inbetween meetings.

I actually believe this may just be an intuitive part of the process.

The same would probably happen if I suddenly had a couple of free days - I think the system would auto-callibrate and that my page reviews would result in more items standing out simply because I intuitively know I have more processing time.

Anyway, that is my hypothesis. I will post again in a few days to confirm whether it worked out this way or not.

One question - Do you actually mark in someway where you got up to (for example if you broke off half way down a page to attend a meeting) so that you know where to re-commence? I think one of my issues is that when I return to my lists I keep starting from the top of page 1 again - obviously this is wrong and is certainly part of the reason I did not get beyond page 2!

Hi Andy

I used to get a bit lost in my pages but I numbered them and when I come back to them after time away I just review the whole page again that I was last working on. This way, although maybe not strictly as Mark suggested, it works for me.

The dot is an excellent idea Mark. I've been losing the place quite a lot, so what I did was to number the items in the margin when I cross them them out. It's not difficult to find the last item (but it's easier to find a single dot I imagine). The good thing about numbering the items is you can backtrack and see what order you did them in and if you write the date of the first item you do that day in the margin (in brackets say, so you don't confuse it with the date you entered the first item), then you can fairly easily walk through everything you did on that day and in order. I find a disadvantage with the basic system is there is no way to know what you actually did on any particular day.

It's strange but I started by making sure I could keep track of when I did a particular item but that has lost it's importance. I find that it now does not matter to me when I did an item, just what is still outstanding. Has anyone else found that?

I can see that I will need to keep track of certain tasks, for example if anything is billable or needs to be reported on, but suspect I will generate a system for that when I need to.

Christine B,

Yes - I have an electronic-based approach using a PDA virtually all the time. And I've not bothered keeping track of any task start/completion dates since AF was released on Monday.

Neither do I "cross off" any items. I just move the task to the last electronic page once I have done a bit of it so I have pages of gradually decreasing numbers of items.

None of this has made any difference at all to the effectiveness of me getting things done.

As you say, it is only what is left to be done that really matters.

Thanks for that Mark. I am noting the date against the first item each day which is helpful for keeping track and also for me to see the difference in volume on the days when I have a complete day to work as opposed to only a few hours. The volume of items is not telling me anything at present because a lot of the new items I am now adding are carry overs from DIT declared backlogs so would skew any statistics. Once they are all included (which I am entering gradually rather than in one go) it will provide an interesting means of comparison. I am struggling with the speed aspect at present (mentally really as opposed to physically) because the items added from backlog are a lot more high resistance - and more time intensive. Need to think that point through some more - cue new "thinking time" task!

A simple paper clip can also help to identify the current "active"/selected task.