Get Everything Done

As everyone is talking about tweaks, here is mine! I have written about my earlier tweak regarding creating mini-lists in the following post:

http://www.markforster.net/forum/post/720175#post720263

As I had mentioned in that post, even though it had worked well, it did not have the same flow as pure AF. So, here are my updates with liberal help from the feedback/tweaks others have created for themselves!. It has been working for me very well for almost a month and it definitely seems to be more in the flow (to me):

Normal Days:
○ Every day, I look through the entire list to see if any of the items on the older active pages can be brought "forward". The items may be part of a critical project I am working on, or may have become urgent or may be batched together (context based -- travel situation) I move them to the end of the list (most recent active page) and cross it off from the older page.
○ My normal AF processing is as follows: I start with the last page and move backwards. All the pure AF rules apply. This puts more weight on the newer items and less weight on the older items. But it complements the previous as well as the following step.

Bad Days:
○ On the really bad days when I cannot do my normal AF processing due to critical projects or urgent tasks, I mentally think of the last 1-2 pages as a closed list and exclusively work them. For me, this typically is a day or two and does not last longer than a week at the most. Since these type of items are already culled into the last pages from the step 1 (or through new additions), they are all in this closed list.
○ Once the storm passes, I revert back to my normal AF processing i.e. moving through the pages backwards to the older pages.

Dismissal:
○ Whenever task items have not been accomplished for 2 weeks or when I believe that any item will not be actioned in the near future, I just simply dismiss them individually. This has been the hardest for me to embrace but I have finally figured that dismissal does not equate to failure or the item will never be actioned.
○ Dismissal of individual item counts as something done in a page so you don't have to dismiss the entire page if you don't action anything else in the page.
○ Every week I review the dismissed items to see if they can be brought back to life. If so, I add them to the last page only if there has been at least 1 week has passed from the time of dismissal.
○ If any dismissed item will never be actioned for various reasons, I just cross them off.

So far, I have found that this setup ensures that older page items don't languish for long (move forward), urgent things do get taken care of (start from the last page) and keeps the pages from going stale (dismiss with strict rules).

GC

Nice tweak! I tend to schedule time to carry out older tasks and then work on reverse order. But your system sounds much more flexible, I'll be watching your posts with great interest!

Okay, I need to clarify the move forward step. I move forward items ONLY on an exception basis (urgency or criticality driven). I don't move forward items just because I feel like doing that item. I tried it and that doesn't work very well. It works better when it stands out when I come to that page.

Hi GC, how many active pages do you have? I also pre-dismiss items, more because I came to realize that I always seem to throw something that's more of a 'considering / thinking about doing' item on the pages fairly regularly. I don't count it as actioning the page though.

I have 21 active pages (26 items each) at present. I had many more active pages but the dismissal rule is keeping this in check now. Right now, I am in the middle of the crazy day syndrome, so have switched to my last 2 pages processing mode. Came up to take a deep breadth. So far so good!

JC

Wow - your 26 items/pp aren't all not complete are they? That's like 546 items!?!
I can't remember - are you one book or two (home + work)?

What you are doing is similar to what I did when confronted with year-end and just wanting to focus on the current for that couple of weeks, and if I picked off a few other things, that was great, but it didn't really matter.

Sorry I wasn't clear. 26 items is max per page. I have an average of about 18pp open at this time (378 in total). These include both home+work. For me it didn't make any difference with 1 or 2 lists. So, I stuck with 1 list - simpler to manage.