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By the rules, you scan your list every round! If something is urgent, you will notice and pick it.
Also, if you're busy working through a selection and something comes up that you decide is urgent, then you should interrupt what you're doing, scan forward from that item to the end to pick up additional items.
It appears that you are afraid of missing some "urgent" stuff. Suggestion: put it on a calendar with an alarm / reminder, then you should be safe, if the scanning of the FV is not reassuring enough.
And also - I use simple reminder application on my iPhone for time-sensitive urgencies/important routines during the day.
Mark was writing a number of posts about urgency when FV was still in the secret development stage. That is, when he knew about FV and we did not.
Now we see the finished version of the final version and it revolves around urgency. The FV question is the question of what is more urgent than this benchmark task.
So, Mark has a new theory of urgency. He also has an older theory of little and often.
I put them together and I get FV with short chains. When they are short, I scan the list often. This way, I can work on the same project two or three different times in one day and be confident that I will not lose track of any urgent items on my list.
And much work that uses initiative will, at first, have no urgency at all. Unless we are working off different definitions of 'what's urgent', redefining the word to mean "what do I want to do before X" :)
My post was meant in the spirit of Mark's article:
http://www.markforster.net/blog/2012/1/26/urgency-the-natural-way-to-prioritize.html
One of his key contributions in the comments to that article was:
<<The entire point of what I am saying is that if you pay attention to urgency you avoid urgency becoming critical - and therefore don't need to be driven by a sense of urgency. If you deal with things in order of urgency then you avoid deadline chasing.>>
I will leave it to greater semanticists than I to decide if Mark has redefined "urgency." Mark denies that he has.
I will note that all great thinkers allow us to understand the world in new ways. Invariably, existing terminology is inadequate to the task of conceiving things differently. One must either create new words, or change the meaning of existing ones.
I will grant Mark the same privilege I grant Humpty Dumpty with respect to the meaning of words.
Importance plays no role in determining the order of tasks. Mark has given numerous arguments against importance. The essential argument is a reductio ad absurdum. If we do important before unimportant tasks then we would never do anything other than cure cancer, free enslaved children, etc.
I see no reason to believe that Mark has changed his position that if I commit to something, it is important and it goes on the list.
That leaves psychological readiness and urgency.
Given Mark's recent penchant for using Beeminder, let us adopt their frame of reference: solving akrasia.
The problem of akrasia could be defined as the gap between psychological readiness and rational urgency.
If I were rational, the big project due October is urgent today, in March. But I am not rational. Therefore, I am not psychologically ready to work on the October project now.
I am not psychologically ready to do what is rationally urgent. The point of Beeminder and FV is to close the gap so that I want to do what is rationally urgent. That is, I am psychologically ready to do what is best for me in the long term.
On a subjective note, this has been how it feels for me when I do all of Mark's systems. I normally procrastinate. Then when the deadline approaches, I feel a rush of nervous energy and do what I need to do. I then get angry at myself for having rushed, and regret that I didn't start earlier and do a better job.
What Beeminder and FV do is move the psychological deadline closer to the present. So, I start to feel a bit stressed that I haven't worked on the October project today. If I don't do something on the October project NOW, I will have violated an FV rule that I hold important, or I will have to pay money to the Beeminder folks.
Now, the October project not only is rationally urgent, but, psychologically, it feels urgent. So, I tell myself, "I want to do the October project now."
The point of FV and other commitment devices is to get me to do things in an order based on how urgent they would be if I were rational.
"I normally procrastinate. Then when the deadline approaches, I feel a rush of nervous energy and do what I need to do. I then get angry at myself for having rushed, and regret that I didn't start earlier and do a better job.
What ... FV do is move the psychological deadline closer to the present. So, I start to feel a bit stressed that I haven't worked on the October project today. If I don't do something on the October project NOW, I will have violated an FV rule that I hold important..."
Wow. I felt like I had written this myself. You summed it all up for me. This is what I do, and why FV works for me. Just an uber-simple rule set that I can follow consistently. It's genius really. It addresses the well-intentioned solution that most time-coaches toss out there - just break it down into pieces and do it! Much easier said than done, for the reasons you've stated.
If that was all we had to do, then sites and tools like this wouldn't exist. We would all just make a list and finish it. Fortunately, we are much more complex creatures than that. :)
To say its all urgency discounts that much of your work is discretionary. Often you decide how much you work on something, and how hard.
"The most distinctive feature of FV is the way that its algorithm is primarily based on psychological readiness - this then opens the way to keeping urgency and importance in the best achievable balance. " - Mark Forster.
"What do I want to do before I do x?" is the only question that I feel is sustainable in the long term, precisely because the reasons you might want to do something before x are not defined.
If you think about it, the thing that's first on the list has been looked at and rejected quite a few times before it got to that point. Take my current chain as an example:
-> tidy up blogroll
-> clean out inbox
-> invoice blog post
-> fix methods chapter headings
-> edit methods chapter
-> review dismissed (maybe I should call this "someday/maybe" now)
-> shower (yes, I'll forget if I don't put it on my list)
-> FV forum ~ urgency
There are probably 75-100 OTHER items in my list besides these eight. None of them are urgent in the sense that the world is going to end if I don't do them right now. Most of them are more "important" in the objective sense of the word than culling dead links from the blogroll. But there is something going on in the RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THESE TASKS that made them be the ones that ended up in the chain. For me, that's the huge change with the move to FV - using the relationship between the tasks to influence selection.
And now to go think out loud about urgency...
Any advice?
The question isn't "Do I want to do this?"
It's "What do I want to do before I do x?"
There's quite a difference.
Basically what you are saying is that you have a lot of semi-urgent things to do which you don't want to do. But you do want to get them done presumably or you wouldn't be worried about them.
Notice that I've used the word want twice in that paragraph.
"Do I want to do this?" would be addressed to the first one. "What do I want to do before x?" would be addressed to the second.
One method is to copy the urgent items to a separate list and work that list with FV. If I expect to be on that list for a while, I include the first few unactioned item from the main list. It's reassuring because that's how I used to work, and I can easily see how much is left to do before the deadline.
I notice that after a few ladders, most of the stuff left on the short list isn't as urgent as I thought. Once I'm done with the short list (ie no longer frazzled), I update the main list by crossing off old tasks and adding new ones, and throw out the short list.
That method don't doesn't give the benefit of a ladder which includes productive things I want to do. It's very easy to leave the list and be distracted and do things that aren't list-worthy.
I also tried highlighting urgent items in the main list, just a coloured dot. Again, it's just reassurance that I won't forget them. I'm not sure if it has any benefit other than reassurance, since I have to flip through all the pages to see how many are left before deadline.