Get Everything Done

If I can interpret Mark's work a little bit, I'd say that Mark addresses your concerns by telling you, essentially, to stop trying to solve the problem through more sophisticated, complicated, or involved methods of organizing your work. Instead, Mark espouses a set of principles for engaging with your work that are then practiced by implementing a type of mechanical system or a set of habits to engage with your work using these principles. Among these various principles, I'd say that the following are the most important:

* Simplicity
* Minimal organization
* Pruning commitments
* Standing out or "using intuition"
* Little and Often
* Systematic engagement/routine
* No "on the ground" prioritization based on importance

To work with these principles, Mark has a bunch of tricks and perspectives, but also tends to focus significantly on "low level time management systems". In other words, systems for helping you to choose the right thing to focus on at any given moment and to focus on that thing without worrying about the other things.

These systems can be roughly divided into what I think of as 4 major kinds:

* Goal/vision driven (The Dreams methodology)
* Long list systems (Autofocus, FVP/FV, Simple Scanning, &c.)
* No-list systems (5/2, NL-FVP, &c.)
* Closed list systems (Do It Tomorrow)

The way that Mark generally assumes that you will be working is that you will have the following "minimal" systems:

1. A calendar for appointments and dated items
2. Any project notes/materials that are for information/reference
3. A low level time management system

And optionally, for some systems, if your low-level time management system doesn't include it, you will have an "authorized projects" list which is a list of your on-going commitments in your life or "things you are committed to working on." The Dreams method is a little unique in its approach, so it's best to think of it as its own thing.

Most of Mark's systems focus on how to manage your discretionary time, which is the time in which you can choose what you are doing, rather than having a hard time commitment. So, appointments and other hard time blocks would be on your calendar/diary, but there will be, presumably, blocks of time in which you have discretion as to what you can do in that time. Mark focuses on how to manage this, and generally encourages you to maximize the amount of discretionary time that you have.

Mark generally doesn't spend a lot of time on how you would manage your project notes or your calendar (in the above sense). It's assumed that you will have some reference system in place and some calendar of suitable power in places. At that point, you have to figure out the system you will use to choose what to do when you have discretionary time, which is where the bulk of Mark's systems spend the majority of their time.

You talk about organizing projects and addressing important tasks. I've already mentioned that Mark assumes you have some way of keeping project notes, so I'm assuming you are talking about organizing the "tasks" that you have to do to complete or work on a project. A big point that Mark tends to make is that once you have committed to doing something, you've committed to doing it, and so it has to get done, regardless. Thus, after commitment, everything is of equal priority. Generally speaking, Mark has made apoint of noting that the time for prioritization based on importance is best handled before you commit to doing something. If you are committed to something, then you need to do it. At that point, urgency is really the only other thing that matters.

What usually happens is that people have more than they can possibly get done on their plate at a given time, and they have a fuzzy degree of commitment to these things. They, in other words, lack clarity about what they have committed to doing and what they are just wishing/hoping that they will do at some point. Mark generally argues that it's not worth spending time upfront to plan and organize all of these tasks that you have when you likely don't even have the time to complete them all in the first place. Any time spent organizing and prioritizing just means that you are spending time on things that you likely won't even complete or do at all.

Thus, Mark generally recommends that we stop this sort of organizational and planning flagellation and utilize a low level time management system to help us to drive immediate action and improve clarity over what we can do, what we have time to do, and what we really want to commit to doing. It's an "agile method" of working, where we focus on doing what we can do, and letting the rest go, while eliminating or greatly reducing the amount of planning time that we may waste by taking away from the time we could be spending doing things.

Mark has addressed these problems in a variety of pretty novel ways, IMO. If you are interested in an approach that is much more structured (by Mark's standards) and is built on the idea of very consciously trying to calibrate your life so that the amount of work you are doing matches the amount of work you are adding to your plate, then the DIT (Do It Tomorrow) method is his most well known "closed list" method of this sort and you can read that book to find out more about that.

However, that's not the only way to go about it. Mark has also developed a set of practices around the idea of "no-list" time management systems. His book "Secrets of Productive People" generally is organized around this idea, and he talks about things at length in that book. In this approach, you think hard and maintain a clear sense of what you are allowing onto your plate through an Authorized Projects list, but to choose what you do from moment to moment, you use a no-list system.

A no-list system is a low level time management system in which you create a new list of work you intend to do from the top of your head (and also any reminders that have been put into your calendar). That list is kept intentionally very short, and you work immediately off of that list, filling it up as you complete the work. This way, the work is always fresh and nothing is standing around building up fear, resistance, or stress on the list. The method in SoPP is the 5/2 method, which is to list five items, and then work them using the "little and often" principle until there are only two level, and then adding three more to bring the total back up to five.

Finally, Mark's most popular set of time managements systems is probably his set of long list systems. In these systems, the main artifact that you work from is a single list of all the stuff you might do. This represents not a set of commitments, but a set of possibilities that you might do. The idea here is to simplify all of your organization by not prioritizing, planning, or pre-filtering any of the items that go onto the list. Instead, you just put almost any sort of task, project, or idea of something you could do onto the list. It's also called a "catch-all" list. The idea is that it all goes into the list, except for things that go on your calendar and reference information that you keep for specific projects.

By just putting it all onto the list, you don't need to organize or do anything else to your work before you start working on it. This is unlike the no-list and DIT systems, which have some degree of "pre-processing" in which you have to decide whether something, for instance, will be allowed onto your authorized projects list. Since the list represents possibilities, rather than commitments, you can put pretty much anything and everything on there.

The key differentiator in Mark's long list systems is that they are all some set of algorithms/rules for how you process and do things on that list. These various algorithms are the "TM Systems" that everyone here talks about. Each one is designed to help you do a few things, but primarily they are there to help you choose something to do in the moment and also just as importantly, highlight things on the list that you are *not* doing anything on and thus should maybe be removed (dismissed) from the list, delegated, or otherwise reworded or adjusted. Thus, long list systems are designed as sieves for filtering out the work that you want to do versus the work that really isn't something you want to do.

Some key components of most of Mark's long list systems are the concept of little and often and standing out. Choosing to do something in these systems generally means you do "as much or as little work as you want to or feel like doing" before you stop. Once you stop, the systems will usually have some rule for how you re-enter the work if you aren't done with it so that you can continue the work at a later date. This is a part of the "little and often" principle. Systems that are based on "standing out" are those in which you generally choose what to do based on a set of simple rules that guide you to selecting a task which "stands out" to you as ready to be done by using your intuition.

There are numerous blog posts and discussion posts about all of these topics and getting a complete understanding of them takes time and requires that you work the systems in earnest to see how they work in practice.

Part of what can make Mark's work difficult is that there is so much of it spread over so many different areas that has evolved over time. My recommendation is that you read Secrets of Productive People and Do It Tomorrow. If you want to see a totally different approach, read How to Make Your Dreams Come True. But you also should read through the blog as much as you can, as it contains the evolution of Mark's ideas over time and includes all of the work on long list systems that were not including in the books.

Finally, as for where to start, I'd say start with the blog and Autofocus, which is the OG of the long list systems.

http://markforster.squarespace.com/autofocus-system

IMO, this is the best way to get started with Mark's approach to productivity. You'll want to read through all of the blog posts on the various topics. For a different long list system, I would recommend that you explore FVP and Simple Scanning next:

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2021/11/16/the-final-version-perfected-fvp-instructions-reposted.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/12/2/simple-scanning-the-rules.html

To get an overview of trade-offs for a lot of popular systems, see here:

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/category/review-of-systems

I'd also read the "Type of Lists" series to get some thoughts on the various types of lists:

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2016/1/25/types-of-lists-i-the-catch-all-list.html

And I'd read the following series as well for a sense of how Mark approach the "biggest problems in Time management":

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2018/9/16/the-biggest-problems-in-time-management-intro.html

And then a few other recommendations:

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/10/10/top-10-advantages-of-the-long-list.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/10/9/thoughts-on-the-long-list-making-everything-easy.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/7/25/standing-out.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/10/6/thoughts-on-the-long-list-accepting-that-it-wont-all-get-don.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/6/17/thoughts-on-the-long-list.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/2/6/the-natural-selection-of-tasks.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2016/12/18/systematic-fast-and-flexible.html
http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2017/2/7/natural-selection-changes-the-emphasis.html