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A closed list would be a single page in your notebook. It is closed in the sense that no tasks can be added to it (when each line is full). This provides the motivational goal of completing a page - which you do not get when you work with an open ended to-do list. Until you have more than one page the list is essentially open. I have found it much easier to apply AF having read Do it tomorrow which uses closed lists as a key tool.
I am certainly not the most knowledgeable on the subject (and I expected you will get better replies) but AF is surprisingly effective at giving a sense of being in control and make progress and treating pages as closed lists helps do this (the number of open tasks on each page gets smaller everyday)
You will find people using this forum remarkably generous and curteous with their advice - I know I have
Regards
Mark j
The key to using a closed list is that you take everything you have to do and sweep it under the rug, as it were. Mark calls it "declaring a backlog", if memory serves. They you pick ONLY what you can reasonably expect to do tomorrow and put it on a "closed list" ... a list to which nothing new will be added unless and until you finish everything on that list.
What about new things coming in? They go on to your backlog to be possibly selected to go on the next day's closed list.
So every day you start knowing what you have to do and having a reasonable expectation of accomplishing it.
This sounds like suicide but realize that clearing out and keeping new stuff from interfering with a relatively small list of things you WILL do is not hampering you. You did not get it all done anyway. Now you are deciding what WILL get done and not even kidding yourself about the rest which did not get done anyway. And the new stuff? Hell, how much cannot wait a day? How much was waiting more than a day anyway?
That is the essence of it, as I understand it.
A closed list is simply a list with a line drawn at the bottom. Examples of closed list are check lists and batches.
There are all sorts of different ways of using closed lists in time management. You can tackle a backlog by "closing" it, i.e. not allowing anything to be added to it until you have cleared it. You can batch up your email, telephone calls or correspondence. You can make a closed list of things you are going to do during a day. Or as in Autofocus you can simply take each page as a closed list.
The biggest advantage of a "closed" list is that it can be completed. A standard "to do" list will be forever having new items added so that no matter how many things you do your "to do" list is always sitting there in front of you. A closed list, whether a check list, a batch of emails, or an Autofocus page is finite - it does not carry on growing with the addition of new tasks because it is "closed". Consequently there is a real potential to "feel" an element of progress in that lists really can be completed.