Get Everything Done

I actually wrote "What do I want to do before I do X?" at the top of the page to keep me mindful of the selction criteria. It helps me avoid some of my previous behaviors I developed when handling a todo list.

If I'm feeling overwhelm or resistance, I ask myself a slight variant, "What do I REALLY want to do before I do X" Thats enough to get me started and for me to keep the chain short enough that things don't bog down. Eventually the lizard brain settles down and things just flow.

Sometimes I change it to "want to get done" rather than "want to do". Reinforcing that connection often makes me realize I want to do it. If it doesn't, then there's resistance, and Mark's given us plenty of advice on that.

I wonder if erring on the side of pre-selecting it would work. Not to an extreme -- that would mean pre-selecting the entire list! Just once or twice a day. When it comes up, you can say, "I changed my mind. The previous dot is more important." Or you can deal with the resistance.

I think you can't truly go wrong in the preselection process. If that last thing you chose you find you aren't truly ready to work on or the one above it is really more important, just follow Mark's rules and put that more important thing on the bottom and dot it then start doing. When you get back to the next dotted item you can either do it or in light of your current knowledge and experience of your work decide to defer it to the bottom of the list.

I was worried that defering in this manner was somehow not right or cheating the system, but I found out that the simple process of iterating over the list over time got me through enough "good enough" choices that at the end of the day when I reviewed my progress I found I had been quite effective. The algorithm seems quite sturdy. The act of defering an item made me mindful enough of it to do it on a subsequent pass.

I suppose I could have spent 10-15 minutes rewriting my list by taking this to an extreme but even if I had the end result would have been a list I was comfortable executing. I certainly wouldn't choose to go through that exercise more than a couple of times no matter how badly I wanted to procrastinate on a particular task.... so it seems to work out in the end.