Get Everything Done

I use text files.
What I do is that I start with something very GTD-like:
As I think of things I need to do, I put them into capture.txt. At this stage I just phrase them in any way that would help me remember.

I need to get to a specific state of mind to do this, it definitely does not come automatic.

I carefully phrase goals to be something that I can see when they’re done. Most of them start with “that”. “That my fridge should be clean”. “That Foo shall have read and graded my essay”. (That’s how I frame essay projects even before I start them.)

And I carefully phrase next actions as small instruction to someone. And I often need to be very stupidly “first”. For example, today I cleaned my fridge. It’s not something I can leave half done, so you might think I’d just write “clean the fridge” since that’s the smallest possible chunk. But I chose to write “Take out everything from the fridge so I can clean it”.

I know many of you have reported that you get good results from using a single list, that’s basically capture and projects mixed together, and then leave next actions to be implicit, and that you have good success from an implicit “get”.
“Fridge cleaned”. “Essay submitted”.
I just can’t do that. I just cannot.
When I’m in the heat of the moment everything phrased like that would just be so “…huh?”. I would procrastinate, everything would be extremely uphill.
I could survive, by constantly and consciously figuring out a next action in my head, leaving it unwritten but phrasing it in my head. So FV the way you do it would still be something helpful for me.
But stressful.
And doing it automatically, subconsciously—it just doesn’t happen.

GTD changed my life back in ‘06 when I first got into it because of the razor sharp edges between “unprocessed ‘huh?’ stuff”, “goals”, and “what to actually do”.
Before, I was a grown woman with a messy house, failing grades, no job… I feared that I was lazy or that life was just very hard and everyone else was just superpowered.

Now, where does FV come into it? This is the FV forum, after all.
I tried FV by the book about a year ago and it failed, not only because of anything I’ve outlined so far but mostly I had the wrong medium (paper—I work better with a keyboard, I type quickly and, more importantly, I read digital text faster than I read my own handwriting) and because I had one HUGE project that gummed everything else up.

After a year of being just pretty messed up, I decided to get back into GTD. It’s been the one thing that has worked best for me and for the longest time, too.
However, I liked the ideas in autofocus, dwm and final version—systems that give you ONE clear thing to do.
GTD, famously, is opposed to A, B and C priorities. The idea is to give you flexibility by giving you options of what you can do right then and there, in a given time and context. So I imagine that orthodox GTD would be opposed to FV.

At the same time, I had the experience with GTD that some things would languish on the lists indefinitely and sometimes I would just do almost nothing. Another drawback would be that as I was doing one thing, if my lists were long, I would be stressed out that “isn’t there something else on my list that is even more important?”.

So I decided to make a rule that on my “home.txt”, I could use various systems to get those things done. AF, pomodoro, FV…
I always liked FV the best of Mark’s systems, just from reading about them. For many reasons.
That’s what I started with the first day, and that’s what I’ve been using every day for many weeks.
So, I can claim that I am doing FV (albeit a hybrid system). For me, this isn’t FV with GTD added, it’s GTD with FV added.

But that FV component is pretty vital. It just works so good and has so many benefits.

I can truly rely on that the bottom-most dotted thing (I started out by just adding a “-” in front of the line, but has since made a few emacs things to make things prettier) is the thing I have chosen to do right now given the consideration of all my stuff ever.

I love that “low priority” things tend to automatically gather at the middle of the list, without me having to decide whether or not they are low priority. And as they get older, they either get done or deleted.

Every morning, I copy “daily.txt” to the bottom of “home.txt”, delete duplicates (daily things that didn’t get done or deleted yesterday) and dot up things from the daily that I want to do before the things in yesterdays chain. On “daily.txt” is mostly things like “make bed”, “water plants” but also meta-things like which files and folders I should process into this system. One of the items on my daily.txt is to go through capture.txt, scratch notes in my bag, my physical in basket and the “review” folder in my email, and for each item there, put a clearly phrased goal on projects.txt and a clearly phrased next action on home.txt (or other.txt if it’s something that I can’t do at home, or waiting_for.txt if it’s something I’ve asked someone else to do, or my calendar if that’s what’s needed).

I then work that combined list as if it were FV. If I work on something, I re-enter it at the bottom in a way that is current (often rephrased). My “project”-list is something I only look at weekly, it’s more of a reminder or safety net, since next actions usually get kept around in a current form reentered at the bottom of the list.
However, totally new items I put in capture.txt, unless they really have to be done that very day. It’s sort of like Mark’s old “Do It Tomorrow” idea—give yourself an extra buffer for incoming distractions. Old business first!

When I process capture.txt I try to delete things or put them on “someday maybe”. I find having a “someday maybe” helps keep the main list shorter.

Weekly, I look over things and might delete projects or move them into someday maybe. I make sure everything is current.

Chain lengths are a popular topic in the FV forum. Personally, I haven’t noticed any particular patterns. Sometimes I only have the one top preselected item, and sometimes I have two or three, and sometimes I make a huge chain. Since I don’t actually “want” to do most things in my list, there’s usually not much I can dot before the top thing, unless it’s something really awful. If something at the top is preselected, perhaps its time has come and I just have to do it, and I do.
I really like that you can select things that flow well together.

I often work through about two to five chains per day. It really depends.
Some days I want to work on a huge task and other days I want to fix many small things (to shorten my lists).

Now, the principle of “touch it once” is another thing that has come up here, but I think it might’ve been misunderstood. It’s not about touching an item only once throughout it’s entire lifetime, finishing every project immediately. Rather, it’s about the review process. You decide what is to be done with the item and then you don’t redecide what you do with it. That’s why I place such emphasis on phrasing. I want to decide what is to be done once and for all.
Then, once I have the next steps figured out, sure, I might work on it “little and often”. But I don’t have to re-decide on it every day.

It’s the same reason why I don’t leave a bunch of mail in my inbox, so that everytime I need to do something with mail I get taunted by those old things that “oh yeah, should do something with those”.
My inbox is for things that I have not seen. Mail that gets there is one of four A:s.
• Answer immediately, in which case I do
• Annihilate, for pure spam.
• Archive, for things that I don’t need to do anything with
• Aaaah! Later!!. These I put in a folder marked Review.

The next morning I make a decision for each mail on what I actually need to do on them, and enter the results of that decision into project.txt and home.txt, and move the mail away to a place I can find it once I’ve done those things, but don’t review it. (Either just the big archive, or if it’s very generic and thus hard to find/search for, I put it in a folder called “tracked” where I keep things like that.)

It’s the same with “capture.txt”. I don’t want to re-decide on everything on that list a thousand times. Just touch it once so it gets turned into projects and actions and the “capture prompt” deleted. Same with incoming paper mail and things. As I review them, I put it into my paper archives.

So, “touch it once” doesn’t have to stand in opposition to “little and often”.
However, little and often isn’t always the best.
The great thing about “little and often” is how it defeats procrastination.
“Little and often” is the enemy of “never”, and that’s great, so we do need to use some amount of “little and often” sometimes.
On the other hand, everytime I switch to a project, that’s extra overhead. Even if it’s quickly to find everything I need, I still have to get into the right mind set. If I don’t watch myself, I will “little and often” TOO much. Just writing a single sentence on every project. I find that it helps me to set up a small “minimum goal” for that work session, so I don’t squander the opportunity now that I have that project out.
I’m also prone to distraction away from boring tasks while, paradoxically, I tend to have trouble switching away from very captivating/interesting tasks.
And that’s worse in the beginning of a task—the first hour or so. Once I get into it, I can stick with it.

I try to match the degree of “little and often” with my workload and how much I procrastinate at the moment. If there is something I really dread doing, even a single sentence on that daily is great. OTOH, if I’m constantly doing great stuff, I might as well put in a bit of time in every session.

Especialy for that one, preselected “at the top” item. Once something has gotten to that position, it is probable that it hasn’t been done particularly “little and often”—i.e. I am prone to not preselecting it. So I need to put in a bit of extra effort once “it’s time has come” and I need to do it.

In other words, if you find your FV-list is long, I have two pieces of advice.
• You might be doing “little and often” TOO much. It adds overhead and it adds the amount of time every item needs to be on the list.
• Consider a someday/maybe list even if you don’t do rest of GTD. One easy way to do it is to take your entire list, once it has grown too long. Put it in a someday/maybe pile. Start a new list and populate it with the most current and important things from all of the lists in your someday/maybe pile.

In conclusion,
thanks for inventing FV.
It is only part of the system I use, but it is a vital and central part.
I follow it every day.

Sandra

Mark,
I have been away from FV forum for months, but I use it every day; so What book is on my reading horizon? Thanks and Regards.

Hi Sandra
Thank you for this very interesting thread. I absolutly agree with you about 2 points
1. GTD and FV can absolutly co exist together
2. Using a .txt file is the best way to manage action files for there is no compatibilty problems
About your method I am going to read it carrefuly. It is near what I did and still do for years.

OK.Took sometime to read it. You could do what you do with a sofware like Omniifocus if you are on Mac or tooledo or whatever is able to manage list. But any way it doesnt care txt files are also perfect for this except if you have a sync need everywhere you are.
I like the way you explained your process.
As I am a GTD user for years I perfectly understand what you do and how.
I also think like you may be that FV is better for acting. There is a real difficulty with a traditionnal context GTD list with me. It simply never works realy. All 5 GTD process is OK - Project and Horizon too but context occurs to me a real proscratrination. I Dont know why. I just can't understand.

At last for project you could use an excel file which aloud you to numbers projects and sort them in actionable or not and also priorities it may help for you weekly review. But it is only an idea txt file can also do the same exept for numbering wich could be more complicated even if it is doable.