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This thread has been locked.
I think that, apart from the current number, it is also important to know the trend. For me, the number has been hovering around 80 for some weeks. This is to me an indicator that there is a reasonable balance between items added and processed. I'd become worried if the number of open items were increasing consistently.
These lists are called-out from the main list. When I look at one of these lists, my primary action now is to grab stuff from them and dump them into my FV list. Over a month I've absorbed several externals, and created one new one, so the overall number of tasks seems to be shrinking, and the FV list remains a manageable length.
The old notes took fewer lines than I expected, since many were duplicates or sub-tasks of bigger projects. The latter were mostly demoted to notes, with a few items promoted to lines of their own.
A few of my tasks are "gathering" tasks. "Room of the day" means pick one and work on it. I almost always want to do that once a day. On the other hand, if you give me a list of rooms I won't want to work on any of them. When I finish the room, I mark both "room of the day" and the actual room as actioned. It's the same with "outside work".
Down from 220 actives 5 weeks ago, with the oldest one at the time from 2nd Nov 2011.
Biggest effect of FV? Getting and staying aware of the contents of the entire list, surfacing "problems" that were hidden before, and getting the "engine" running smoothly again.
The older pages are *very* sparse, and they tend to die off in bunches as the list consolidates toward the front.
Oldest task is one month back, a considerably shorter interval than when I began FV.
I have not counted my tasks/pages before, but I certainly have the feeling that FV has been moving things along much better. I know it has created less (no) resistance and less fiddling. It's wonderful how the oldest tasks get lopped off one by one.
4/18: 518
4/17: 681
4/16: 718
4/9: 513
4/4: 136
3/21: 630
It sure does swing pretty wildly. When I have discretionary time, it drops pretty fast. When I have lots of meetings, it rises back up again. Need to turn off the spigot...
How does anyone have 500? Is that even a realistic list?
This system really works or me.
I've lived with a long list for years. I am usually happy with what's getting done, especially starting with AF three years ago, and now with FV; so I guess it's realistic. :-)
<< What % are actually done? >>
Was that intended for me?
<< What % are actually done? >>
If not Alan, at least I would like to hear your answer to that, Seraphim. More precisely, what percentage of your long 500+ tasks list is done each day.
My list have been growing from around 150+ to 170+ now. I've been doing about 10 or so tasks per day, so about 5% of my tasks get done (little&often) each day.
Lots of them are COMPLETED, and lots of them are RE-ENTERED, and lots of them are DELETED. Not sure exactly what percentage of the tasks gets which kind of treatment.
On days with little discretionary time, I sometimes action zero items, sometimes as many as 50.
It is a constant effort to clear the calendar of unnecessary meetings and make more time for working my list. I get lots of things done when I have enough discretionary time. But the meetings always generate new work while taking away the time to actually get it done. :-(
Five were left over from the prior chain, which I extended, and most of the additional 42 were ideas I'd jotted down about a project over several weeks. The only action for those items was to collect them onto a list for that project, as such a list did not yet exist. It was essentially an extended brainstorm.
That sure made a dent in my list! I have one or two more of those collection lists brewing in my notebook right now, so I think more dents are coming.
So now you're up to 900 items. And I regard my work-list of 151 items as too long.
How long does it take you to scan a list of 900 items and create a new ladder? And how often do you create new ladders?
Chris
This is the first time it's taken me so long to finish a chain. It's happened that way because, lately I've been resetting after long blocks of meetings, not having finished the chain. By "resetting" I mean clearing email and inboxes, and scanning from the last dotted item to the end of the list, for new items that I want to do before X. All per the rules. :-)
I am resetting like this because I have too many meetings and projects right now, and not enough discretionary time. But there are specific reasons for that, and a lot of this will go away in about two weeks. I expect to see the list significantly shorten after that.
It seems like you can succeed with these long lists for a couple of reasons. The biggest might be that you have a good feel for what your overall workload will be like (overloaded more now than normal and a reprieve in a couple of weeks). But you also stick to it and know what is on your list. Otherwise it would take longer than 20-30 minutes to scan a list of 600-900 items. Little and often has to be key or your list wouldn't always be so long.
It's also obvious that you've done a good job of separating scheduled events from discretionary time and understand that balance, even when you can't control it.
I think there were earlier discussions on the General Forum were the consensus was that the item count wasn't as relevant as it seems based on what people put on the list in the first place.
900 items - wow!
Assuming an average of 10 minutes per item, that would be 150 hours of work.
At an average speed of 3 mph you could walk from Washington to New York and back in that time!
Having a day with no meetings can make all the difference in the world. :-) :-)
This system really, really works well.
All new entries are usually dealt with within one or two days. Hence my list rarely goes beyond 20 items.
103 on a "can put off indefinitely" list. For weeded tasks.
<< @ Chris Cooper. Yes it's too long, I agree. :-) Totally new chain takes 20-30 minutes to set up. I just finished a chain this morning, for the first time in about a week.
This is the first time it's taken me so long to finish a chain. It's happened that way because, lately I've been resetting after long blocks of meetings, not having finished the chain. By "resetting" I mean clearing email and inboxes, and scanning from the last dotted item to the end of the list, for new items that I want to do before X. All per the rules. :-)
I am resetting like this because I have too many meetings and projects right now, and not enough discretionary time. But there are specific reasons for that, and a lot of this will go away in about two weeks. I expect to see the list significantly shorten after that. >>
Wow, that's a lot of time investment per chain. No wonder you find yourself using that "partial reset" approach, especially when you get too busy.
30 minutes to make a chain from 900 items? That's about 2 seconds of attention per item on average? By chance, are you stopping at each item to consider "Do I want to do this before I do x?" rather than scanning the list looking for "What do I want to do before I do x?" There was a previous thread that talked about the subtle difference between the two, and how scanning is maybe 10x faster than considering each task individually. What if you scan rapidly and create short chains more often?
I don't have nearly as many items as you do (in the 50-100 range), but it doesn't take noticable time to create a chain because I'm scanning across most of the items I'm already familiar with, and most of the items I'm selecting are the high-priority items at the top of my list or the recent items at the end of my list, and I typically end up with about half a dozen items selected for the chain.
I just finished a chain as I was leaving work today. If I remember, I'll try to time how long it takes to make a chain and give a count of how many items are on my list in total, but I don't think I give each item anywhere near 2 seconds of attention during the preselection process...
It seems like 50-100 items is a lot more manageable than 500-1000... Seraphim, how is it that you always have so many items coming in? Is the granularity that fine, or are you including things that most of us wouldn't put in the list?