Get Everything Done

Here's an n=1 anecdote.

I had been doing FV for months and found that, occasionally, my backlog would grow. So, I decided to "want" to do all items in my list that were older than a week.

(That was not an original idea of mine. It was from Mark Forster's DWM system.)

That worked really well. But I realized that I always had a one-week backlog. It dawned on me that if I wanted to have a six-day backlog, I could have it.

So, I committed to a six-day backlog. And it worked.

I was really humming along with this short backlog, when I decided to challenge myself some more.

Before I explain what I did next, I want to emphasize that the particulars of my experience are not especially important (IMHO). That is, the fact that I committed to increasingly smaller backlogs is probably not that relevant to many readers.

What I think is important is that my consistent use of FV made me develop better habits, become better at managing time, and have more self-control and discipline.

Once those improvements kicked in, it was only natural that the way that I use FV would evolve.

I read Mark's blog post about a must-do list and some of Cricket's references to Agile Results. I had always had a kind of "today list" (I believe that is Daneb's term) which I kept in tasksmash.com (but could be done in beeminder or any other place). I also always had a "this week list."

I never consistently did the things on my weekly list. I almost always did the things on my today list, but that was because my today list was structured like FV, if I do anything on the today list, I count it as a win.

With my new-found grit, I decided that I would start putting things on my today and week list that can only count as wins if real results are achieved. So, it is no longer possible to merely take out the file folder and feel great. I still use that as the win criterion for my FV list, but not for my today and week list.

I am sure there are some people reading this who will smirk. Having a certain result completed at a certain time is not exactly revolutionary. But those kinds of deadline-driven systems have never worked for me before. I always resisted them and failed at them.

I am still only in the early stages of this. It is too soon for me to declare it a success. But the fact that I felt sufficiently competent to attempt this is a success of sorts, in my estimation.

Again, the point I am trying to make is not that I have found a tweak that improves FV. I have not. The point is that by using FV consistently I have become more disciplined and more able to take on greater challenges. The use of FV has changed me, and as I change, the way that I use FV changes.

(By the way, now that I am committing to getting results before the deadline, my FV backlog has increased by a day or two. I am more than happy to let this happen because it is quite clear that I am getting much more of the important stuff done.)

Cricket,

Another thing I learned to implement from you was milestones, that is, intermediate deadlines.

I would love to love everything and everyone. But I don't. And I don't think that I ever will. One important way that I get things done is by creating urgency. Having deadlines creates urgency. Making it a rule that my backlog cannot exceed x days creates urgency.

Otherwise, I tend to go into "out of sight, out of mind" mode. With GTD I would look at my list once a week. And then I would do nothing until next week when I would look at my list again.

My GTD list did not have the DWM urgency, whereby an item gets deleted if not actioned within a week. My GTD list had no deadlines. So there was always something that seemed more important or urgent than the stuff on my GTD list.