Get Everything Done

I spent most of April giving NQ-FVP a crack to see how it would work for me again after a hiatus with other systems. In the end, I've concluded that as a daily TMS system it's unsuitable for me for a few interesting (to me) reasons.

What I liked:

* The crossing off of items is very addictive
* It was very good at allowing me to change my mind when things came up
* Using NQ was relatively fast, and I didn't feel too bogged down in terms of finding something to do
* It really felt good to have all things in one list
* It was good at letting certain things languish at the beginning of the list for a while and let me focus on only a few things instead of getting spread too thin on projects

What I didn't like:

* I felt that having things in one long list failed to give me a good sense of how well I did during the day
* It was FAR too easy to choose to do things that in the end I wasn't happy that I had done. In short, FVP ironically made it easier to procrastinate by doing "administration" stuff that produced the potentially for exciting new inputs, but that didn't make progress on the boring old things that I already understood.
* I didn't have a good sense of my time or day
* I didn't feel a good sense of calm, and there was always a little undercurrent of anxiety coming from a sense that I wasn't really doing what I wanted to do
* My ability to manage a day's worth of work (instead of over doing it) wasn't good. Since I don't have any other structure in my life, my TMS is pretty much the sole driving sense of structure, and FVP didn't really encourage me to stop when I should have just gone to bed.
* I found that a lot of things showed up that really I didn't want to review yet, but that I didn't want to not review yet. In other words, I wanted to be aware of it, but FVP didn't really give me the right cadence of how often to review, and putting it on my calendar or some tickler didn't seem right either.
* With FVP I had to have a separate paper calendar and I often found myself flipping through pages of my planner too much.

It's ironic that FVP helped to focus in on a few things, but among those few things, tended to encourage me to do too much of the trivial. I think this fundamentally comes down to the fact that with an FVP list, it's too easy to procrastinate by choosing the comfortable things on the list or the things that present some sort of promise for new things (email, forums, youtube). This gets especially bad because you are "rewarded" for doing those things because they count as something that you crossed off your list and did in the day. The truth is that I want to do those things daily, but I only want to do so much of them. However, I often enjoy doing them, and that means that I have to find some way to scale back my actioning of those items so that I only do them a little bit each day. I don't find timers helpful, and I found that NQ-FVP was just too nice about letting me do those things and feel good about it.

The result was that I felt like I wasn't really accomplishing much, and that meant that I was never really happy about how my day ended. I tried to change the way I tuned my brain for things to stand out, but it just wasn't enough.

At this point, the system that consistently helps me to feel the best at the end of the day and produces the best results has been my use of the Ivy Lee method, which I'm going back to. The biggest thing that my Ivy Lee method gives me is that throughout the whole day I never have to make a decision about what I'm doing, and I only get to reward myself with a sense of accomplishment if I do something worthwhile. I don't get rewards for doing too much of something. Additionally, I'm able to have my daily schedule, my todos, my habits, and so forth all on a single page for the whole day, and I can be confident that I have sufficient work for the day, while not needing to leave the page. I also don't have to give up the long list benefits of being able to put anything that I want on my list, as I have space on each page to write down all of the new things that come up.

This doesn't mean that I've given up on FVP, though. It turns out, FVP is really good for efficiently sorting my tasks. It can be very stressful trying to sort your tasks with pen and paper in a way that feels efficient and that doesn't feel like you're missing things. FVP is very good at this.

What I'm doing now is that each day I have a page that I work from. It has an Ivy Lee list of all the things I want to do that I consider "high-value project work" which is anything in my areas of responsibility that are things that would represent high value if they were done. This could be something very small, and menial, like getting the oil changed on the car. The key though is that they are the things that aren't "daily routines" for me. Then I have two other lists, a "Before" and "After" list.The Before list is a checklist/routine of all the things I want to get done, and in what order, before I start working on my Ivy Lee list for the day, and I put only the highest value daily routines in here that I insist should be done before anything else. Then, all my other routines that I need to get done, which are mostly administration, communications, and play/relaxation, are all done in the "After" list. Importantly, this after list is *also* ordered according to the order that I want to do them in the day, roughly in terms of value.

The result is that I have a completely linear set of things to do in a fixed order throughout the whole day. There's never a question of what I should do next. Instead, it's always "the next thing on the list." Being able to always know that the next thing on the list is the thing to do next is really, really compelling for my mind, and greatly relieves almost all of my stress about the day. Another important thing, for me, about this is that it helps me to focus like nothing else. If I sit there and do nothing in the day, that's fine, but my mind will want to do something, and eventually, I know that it will want to do the one thing it is allowed to do on the list. Moreover, the motivation to do that one thing will rise faster and I will melt any potential resistance to that task faster this way than with any other. It's sort of like a "do nothing" meditation.

What I've found by only ever having one next thing that I can possibly do is that resistance gets completely eliminated in practice. I almost never find it difficult to start doing that one thing. If I do, i just sit there with that feeling for a small moment or maybe a few, and before I know it I'm doing that thing. What I found with FVP was that there was always something else I could be doing if I wanted to, for a very long time, before I would actually get to the thing I really would feel better about having done.

This also has the wonderful effect that certain things that I need to do every day for my sanity, such as email, forums, relaxing, etc. but that I need to make sure I don't do too much of, are naturally managed. I get rewarded for doing them once, but once they get crossed off my list, they won't show back up until the next day, and I can't get rewarded or a sense of accomplishment for doing them again. Moreover, I know that they are on my list and that I will get to them, but I also know that I can't get to them until a certain time. This gives me certainty that I will get to them, but also prevents me from wasting time on them too early. This has a strong closed list effect so that they get done, but not too much, all without needing timers.

However, all of this requires that I am able to put things into the Ivy Lee list, and sometimes that has been a pain. Now, though, this is where FVP comes in. My Ivy Lee list is my "active" list of things that I'm doing, but on each page of my planner as I work through, I will have that open collections/inbox list that collects up the things that would have gone onto my FVP list. In reality, it's *still* my FVP list, but now it serves more as a "standby for action" list than my daily TMS list.

At the end of the day, I use the FVP algorithm to look for the highest leverage activities. As I go through the list, I'll find the highest leverage activity easily, and then that gets crossed off the list and gets put onto the Ivy Lee list. I then continue with the algorithm until my Ivy Lee list is filled up. That gives me all the work I will do first thing the next day. I can always go back to the FVP list after those 6 things are done if I want, but I almost never do that, because I usually make sure the tasks are the right size so that I rarely if ever can get all six of them done in the day, but I can almost always get at least one of them done. And of course, I'm always doing them in order, not out of order, as per the Ivy Lee rules.

This allows me to stay relatively dynamic, because the FvP algorithm will adapt to daily changing priorities over time, but because I'm not constantly using the FVP algorithm during the day, that flexibility doesn't serve as a distraction on me. Additionally, the Ivy Lee method permits you to reorder your list of six items at the end of the day for the next day if you so choose, so I can adapt my order of actions each day. This is more than enough flexibility for me in almost all situations, and any more flexibility within the day just tends to lead to chaos, I am finding. As long as I can change my priorities daily, but no more frequently, then I find I'm able to stay on track.

I think I benefit from this because of how little external structure I have imposed on me, which means that I strongly benefit on any structure that I give myself, which I *need* to give to my future self, because my present self will always rebel against it in the moment, but I am okay with giving my future self a nice schedule, provided that it's a good one and doesn't have time blocks in it. It's also extremely powerful to be able to see not only how far I have gotten in the day's work, but also get a sense at the end of the day of how well I did instantly by simply looking at a single page, my in the way that a 5/2 no list helps you to review your day.

Thus, in the end, I still find myself unable to apply something like NQ-FVP as a daily TMS system that I can use in the moment to choose something to do, but I am finding "What is more important?" FVP to be an excellent daily pre-planning tool that I use every night to help lay out exactly what I will focus on during the next day. The key for me is making sure that those tasks are separated out from my daily habits and routines that I want to maintain, so that I'm never putting up my project work against my daily routines in that question of "what's more important?".

I still wish I could use a single long list, but I think the value of the kind of "daily routine checklist" and the WIP limitations of Ivy Lee are just too powerful and effective in my life to be able to simplify things down to a single long list.

I agree that the "end of the day" part of things is critically important for me.

JD:

Good questions. The method I describe above *is* using FVP as a feeder list for my Ivy Lee tasks. The one difference is that I will try to break the task down before I put it on an Ivy Lee list to make sure that I am confident I can do it in under 4 hours. Other than that, the FVP algorithm is used to process a long list that I gather a little bit each day. In other words, each day's "inbox" serves as the list over which I run the FVP algorithm to feed the Ivy Lee list.

I've thought about just dotting 6 things in the original list, this would amount to a limited FV style algorithm. FVP requires that you do another scan between each item, so it's not quite the same. FV has you doing all of the items in order first and then getting back to things.

For a while I thought that I could just use FV as an alternative to Ivy Lee. What I found was that the biggest issue was ordering. You want to do the things in the right order. That's where FVP shines, and where FV can sometimes fall down.

The problem with trying to just do it *in* FVP is that there are too many other things around the dots, which serve as distractions. If I try to do my work "on list" as it would happen with the normal FVP algorithm, I almost always allow myself to get distracted with something else on the list that I want to do instead. This s somewhat alleviated if I take off all of the routine tasks that I want to get done in a day, but the problem then is that I need to chase those daily routines as well, and I no longer have everything on a single long list. Even then, there are often things that will distract me in the day that I could do which will seem appealing in the moment and that I will want to do.

The key "trick" for me is that I essentially use FVP the night before to "simulate" my day as if I were being my "best self". Because doing the simulation doesn't actually cost me very much, it allows me to pretend as if I had just done all the things that I selected in my FVP list that are now in my Ivy Lee list. This reduces resistance to large tasks, and causes a sort of "rehearsal" or visualization exercise to go on the night before, and, as Mark points out, allows me to sleep on this so that my mind can get itself ready to do those things in the next day.

At that point, when I get to the next day, it's important that I don't see any of the other potentially distracting things. Instead, I have a set of three closed lists that I am going to work through in order through the day. This helps to give me motivation because I can see the whole day laid out in front of me, including my appointments, and it also means that I get to see all of the things that I could potentially accomplish in that day, which makes for a bit of "future visioning" as well, because I've painted a sort of aspirational picture of the day that I can look forward to. All of this helps to essentially eliminate any resistance I might have to doing the things I'll be happiest having done by the end of the day, and it helps to prevent me from looking at distractions opportunistically throughout the day. This focusing lens is important for me, I've found.

If I could somehow retain that same long term thinking outlook that I have at the end of the day looking to the future in the middle of my present work day, then I don't think I would need to "hide" my long list from myself as I do, nor split out the daily routines from the other work. But since I have to put those items out of sight and out of mind to prevent me from chasing the easier, shinier stuff in my list on a moment to moment basis, I find I can't do that. Hence, the Ivy Lee list and the routines checklists that allow me to pretend like I don't have along list for the time being. As well, since the day's page that I'm on only has items for the future on it (actually, that's a little DIT like), and none of my existing long list, I only ever see the "days work".

Also, because I know that I'm doing these things in order, to completion, it helps prevent me from feeling bad about not getting through the whole list, because there's no overhead to going through that list. I know exactly what is next, instantly. So if I couldn't get through my work that way, then there's no way I could have done any more than that with any TMS with a higher overhead.

Additionally, because the Ivy Lee list is rewritten every day with anything that didn't get done in the previous day's work, you have the opportunity to reorder things each night. So, for instance, if I discover that I need to do a whole lot more work than I thought on a given item, i can break that item up, or, if I feel like I've made good progress, but I'm not done, I may take that item off the top of the list if there are other things that have become a priority in the mean time. In other words, because I can reorder my Ivy Lee list at the end of each day, this gives me an different sort of flexibility that I find useful. It's akin to having a few items dotted, but then being able to easily reorder those dots as I feel appropriate, *without* having to break flow in the middle of the day to work on other things.

You can accomplish much the same thing in standard FVP if you work little and often as Mark recommends and get through your dots quickly enough (at least once a day) to allow you to reorder things for the future. I find that this hasn't felt good for me, and I find it much easier to allow myself to work as long and as hard as I want for at least a whole day on a single item without fear, knowing that at the end of the day, I can reorder my list of 6 items arbitrarily for the next day if I so choose. The equivalence in FVP would be if I could reorder the dotted items without having to action any but the last dotted item.

So, I'm still basically doing FVP, but I've just tweaked things a lot so that I've broken down the implicit processes in FVP to change how I engage with the work that is selected, and I've cut out things that I always want to select in a certain order, and I've created the Ivy Lee buffer of my work in progress to keep me from staying in the FVP list and getting distracted. This is unfortunately a little more complicated to set up (but not by much!) than just a single long list, but I get the benefit of greatly reduced daily overhead costs and much simpler engagement during the day, at the cost of a single daily book-keeping session with my long list which can be a little more involved (since I'm going more slowly through my list at that point to consider "real importance").