Get Everything Done

Hi I find that I tend to switch systems approaches and tools far far too often to th point where I don’t stick with either paper or digital or a particular app long enough to know what my actual approach is. I love tech and I love paper. Each has their own charm for sure. Just when I think I have found the ‘perfect’ system , ...only too soon I impulsively change to a new approach. Sometimes I think that my abandonment of a particular tool is correct and wise but at other times - hmm not so sure I’m sure that this is a common enough problem, Has anyone been in that situation but now have found they have conquered the attraction of the ‘shiny and the new’. Any advice very welcome. Thank you

Mike:

The "attraction of the ‘shiny and the new’" is a good thing. It is the voice of your soul showing your artistic side. You are an artist, because everyone is. How is art doing in your life?

When you take a look at a productivity app, say, you see a artistic expression of the question of possible categorization of tasks. That excites you, as it does me. Heck, to call a tool "OmniFocus" and thus to make the importance of focus as a concept a tangible product. That alone!

When we feel "art", we want to express it. Hence a switch to that new app.

This is the point at witch we could ask ourselves: is there a better way to express my excitement?

Here is an example of how somebody processed his excitements with User Interfaces:
http://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/gwe2
It's a collection.

Usually, the first step of going about this is to collect for a while, then organize, then process: what does this mean to me? (See, it's almost like GTD inbox processing, just in a bit different order.)

Then we asses what would be the best medium (transporter, carrier) to express this to the outer world, to manifest. This could be a website, a painting, a musical composition, some lines of computer command code, etc

We have to express, not just collect! The high art of collection is to create a museum with a standpoint. That in turn makes you a steward for the respective realm. That pottery, thousands of years old, it's a responsibility.

Collection alone is like a GTD system where you never get around doing any of that stuff! It makes matters worse.

It is not necessary to "switch" to pour your own tasks into that new shiny app or TMS in order to appreciate it.

Re: GTD & System Loyalty

I think this is a really good question and one that I look forward to Mark writing about at length. Indeed, at this point in the journey, I believe that loyalty in a system is the "next frontier" for Mark's general approach, as it's possibly the least developed aspect of his "ecosystem" that's been developed so far.

I have my own theories on this, as I have done serious GTD, Bullet Journaling, HPX (Brendon Burchard), Ikario Focus and Action, Covey's 7 Habits, Pomodoro, Ivy Lee, Mark Forster, Don't Break the Chain, and at least a few others, possibly many others. I've been playing with and working on my productivity systems since I was maybe 10 or 11 years old and reading about the methods of Benjamin Franklin and the early Founding Fathers of the USA, and trying out their methods.

My first major observation is the difference between the effectiveness of a system and the enjoyability of a system. While the two are *not* independent, they are not the same thing, either. Since Stress is one of a few significant internal factors towards taking progressing action, a systems ability to reduce total stress in a user's life contributes to that user being able to take action and do things.

My second observation is that time management, as Mark notes, is ultimately about connecting one's desires and hopes for a future world (the big goals of life, the shining star, the intuited ideal future) to present day action. It's the uniquely human capacity for delayed gratification at a multi-generational scale. It's the concept of time itself and working across time and in the moment simultaneously. Thus, any system ultimately must contend with how well it converges future reality with present reality and unifies the two. That is, how well it enables the user to both chart and walk a path from the Now to the Future.

Thirdly, I will note that this question is directly mirrored in many other domains, where the exact same problems crop up. Large management of programming projects, for instance, is a classic example, or the production and implementation of effective products/projects in companies, or any number of other things that have to deal with A) having a far away end goal, B) not having a clear path to that goal, and C) needing to take action to get to that goal. The key difficulty, IMO, here, among all of these is that inevitably the Goal and the Path are both uncertain and deal with many unknowns. The Goal changes over time or gets refined, and the Path travels through areas that we don't know ahead of time. If either of these things isn't true, then the problem becomes much less difficult, but the first step is recognizing both that the goals are irresolute and the space/path between the goal and where we are now is full of unknowns through which we must travel.

So, where does that leave us with respect to the many systems out there. Well, it doesn't matter which system people are using, there is a strong tendency to not stick with it. That's not surprising, but it's worth noting. It's also worth noting that people don't stick with various systems for different reasons, and usually, they switch to one system or another because that systems addresses the feelings that were not addressed in another system, but often at the cost of loss of good feelings in some other aspect, leading to an inevitable switching process again.

And this is where we get to the first observation above, that people often have very bad attention and honesty with regards to themselves. We will operate based on how we feel about something, rather than what is objectively true about something. Even for those who don't go by their feelings, they might go by their sense of logical order, and when that breaks down, they want to switch to something else, even if that break in order doesn't actually matter. Feelings lie, and logic is inadequate to convince ourselves that we are on the right course (a fundamental truth of Mathematics is that it is inadequate to the task of total Truth about our reality). In other words, there's no perfection, no state of Nirvanna, no Utopia to be had at the moment.

I claim that there is a reason GTD and Bullet Journaling and the like get so popular, while something like AutoFocus, FVP, or especially No-List systems get comparatively little attention. Systems like GTD or BuJo are reificating organizational systems. They primarily concern themselves with organizing and stratifying our plans. In other words, they take a whole lot of our messy thoughts and organize them into an orderly structure in something that we can *see* and *touch* and play with. They are, on the whole, information management systems centered around planning.

With these systems, if you work with them, initially, you get a terrific hit of positive emotion and relief centered around feeling "in control." Put another way, there's a psychological effect that causes a reduction in stress and an increase in confidence whenever the mind "has a plan." Anxiety is reduced when the mind has a plan of action in place. It makes you feel confident. If you are stuck, like many people, in a space of nebulous intention without any direction, and thus paralyzed by what is, at the biological level, fear, you fail to take action because you don't know what the next step is, and introducing a system like GTD or BuJo into that gives you a plan, let's you know what the next step is, and so you feel much better.

When your stress is reduced by such systems, you feel energized and you start moving. You can start taking action. You start being able to *do something* again, and that makes you feel even better. There's an addictive sense of accomplishment, and you start feeling that you've found the answer. But, if you look at what happens with a lot of BuJo and GTD users, you'll note that there is a continual problem with "falling off the bandwagon" and trying to get back on, which often amounts to trying to regain those initial feelings of being in control and making forward progress. A common theme in both communities is a feeling that you can't keep up with the system. The complaint against GTD is that it is "too complex" and the complaint about BuJo is that "all that laying out of spreads is too much work." These are not actually *true* though. In neither case is either of these systems either too complex or too much work in an objective sense. They are actually pretty simple systems when you look at them, and the amount of work to get them usable is actually really low. So what's happening?

Often, what you find is exactly the issue that Mark emphasizes, but that these systems only spend a little bit of time on. When you get better at organizing your life, without having built up habits of saying no, pruning commitments, and the like, you end up simply filling your life up with yet more things up to the limit of your organizational skills. Technically speaking, GTD actually uses Mark's "Standing Out" principle for taking action. There's some discussion over it, but it's often the hardest thing for people to execute in GTD from my observations. Put another way, is the "doing" part of GTD's process that often gets people stuck. GTD is relatively weak in this area, because the only dogmatic answer in the system is "get yourself down to the next action" with the belief that this is sufficient for people to be motivated to do a thing. There's truth to the Next Action secret sauce, but as Mark has noted, this doesn't work if you overwhelm a system such that there is simply too much to "Next Action."

BuJo has the same issue, but they have less Next Action focus and more focus on a Daily, Weekly, and Monthly selection of tasks. This helps to reduce scope, but doesn't sufficiently address the action habit of how to take action. The result is that you end up with lots of organization and rewriting and redoing of reminders of what you hope to do, but never seem to get to doing. This is the demotivating aspect of BuJo. You are encouraged in BuJo, unlike GTD, to systematize the process of "dismissal" as it would be terms in Mark's systems, but this is naturally a very difficult process that people struggle with. This struggle has to do with that meeting point of the future and the now, where you must be confronted both with your limitations and with your potential.

So, the end result is that both GTD and BuJo have a tendency to provide a strong organizational framework for lots and lots of data, but often this possibility of action far exceeds the competency of the users' of such systems ability to actually take action. Put another way, it allows people who are otherwise very disorganized, to competently and efficiently organize much more than they would ever be capable of actually dealing with. This initially provides for a huge sense of relief, energized the user, and encourages action; but, as it progresses, it demoralizes and defeats the user as they continue to overwhelm themselves with all the things they think they ought to be able to do, but are incapable of doing, because both it is physically impossible, and because they are too incompetent at taking action to hope to begin on such a large set of things.

In an ideal world, if you are someone who is highly conscientous, and has a strong drive to take action, but struggles deeply with seeing and understanding the future, as well as making sense of all the myriad of inputs that are coming into your life, then GTD or BuJo are suited to help you get control of that, and start taking action. Because you are already excessively competent in *doing* things, but incompetent in knowing what to do or how it connects to your bigger goals and dreams, then GTD and BuJo can help provide that framework. But even then, Conscientious people might often be too Agreeable and take on too much work, and thus, they will still have a tendency to overwhelm such systems over time with too much to do. While these systems try to help with this, and they speak a little bit to this, the systems aren't balanced to this, and they encourage overloading and overwhelm because they are more efficient in storage of stuff than they are capable of saying no.

These systems are "planning heavy" systems. You spend the majority of your time in the system making plans, and action is expected to emerge out of having a clear plan. The tend to break down because of excessive planning that they encourage.

Mark's systems and approach are, IMO, the exact opposite. There is little to no planning, organization, or structure in the sense that BuJo or GTD has. This makes it easy to get started with them. Since they are easy to get started, and since they focus so much on systematizing the process of taking action, they give you quick wins on the ground. You are, in essence, cultivating a habit of taking action, rather than a habit of planning and organization. If we see the issues with GTD and BuJo, this might seem like exactly the right thing.

But there are a lot of people who won't even give Mark's systems a try, and there are lots of arguments of why they don't want to do this. Then there are those who give it a try and they give up really quickly. And then there are those who give them a lot of tries, but tend to swap around systems.

I think the biggest struggle that people have when they initially get to Mark's systems, and one that I had for years, was understanding the big picture. GTD and BuJo are attractive because they give you affordances that answer your brain's desire for "solutions" in terms of the future. They help to provide you with initial promises about what the solution is, and the argument from A to B in the case of GTD or BuJo is straightforward. While someone might think that GTD is too hard or too complex for them to try it, they at least understand the value proposition and would think to themselves, "Yes, if I did that, then life would be better."

But the value proposition for Mark's systems isn't at all clear. There's a bit of a marketing fog over them. Put another way, people have a tendency to trust the value proposition from GTD, but they tend not to trust the proposed solution that Mark presents, because the evidence and argument in its favor is pretty hidden, and they don't see all the connections. Instead, what they see is the systematic algorithm for processing lists (or, even more scary, the systematic no-list approach), but then they'll think to themselves, "Well, that's all well and good, but I don't need a better way to run my todo list, I need a solution to my life."

I think it's hard to really appreciate why Mark's focus on list processing is the way that it is, and how that *is* a strategy for life progress. Part of this issue is that I think Mark has been very transparent in the process of getting where he's at, and he has always been open about the fact that things aren't perfect, sharing his experiments on the way. This is great, and really enables people to engage at multiple fronts with his work, but it also means that people can get lost in the narrative, and they might not understand what is happening at the big picture level, because so many ideas that are being played with are in play at the same time, and sometimes one of the ideas falls away, while part of it stays around, and so forth.

Put another way, with GTD, you can say, "Read this book, and you'll get the basics." With Mark, you can say, "Try this list processing technique," but it won't "give you the basics," and the more refined answer is, "Read through these list processing techniques and try them to see what works bette for you," but that's a lot of commitment without a clear pay off at the end, and it is incomplete. The real answer is, "Read through Mark's work, including his blog and books, and study the psychological framework he is using to approach solutions, and then evaluate the various list processing frameworks in your own life to get practice at building these habits, and begin to converge on the refined solution that works best for you in the moment." That's a very hard pill to swallow for a lot of people. There's not really a "Productivity Primer". As a good example of a productivity primer, I would read this page from James Clear:

https://jamesclear.com/productivity

If you read that page, you get a clear idea of James' message right off the bat, and a clear roadmap for implementation, as well as a clear idea of how to progress further. There's not such a straightforward roadmap for Mark's stuff, yet. I think maybe SoPP and the "Which is the Best System?" post is probably the best starting point in this respect.

But even then, Mark's approach is hard for people, because it strips away one of the comforting elements of typical "self-help" solutions in favor of a more dynamic approach. In essence, Mark proposes something very similar to the best of the Agile community, which is that if you focus on the core issues of throughput, capacity, and commitment, then you can greatly simplify your overall systems, reduce your overwhelm, become more responsive, and achieve your solutions/goals better and faster, with more flexibility. Another way of saying that would be, "If you get better at the doing, and become more aware of your commitments to doing, then you'll get much better at achieving and progressing." From a psychological standpoint, it's hard to argue with that. If you can have a target and make progress to that, with the flexibility to adjust the direction dynamically, then you'll be able to get to the best place. Attempting to fully map out a path forward isn't really possible.

Mark makes a point that you only should be as organized as is necessary to take action. In other words, the key element is in your ability to take action, and everything else is just in service to taking the right actions. This means you want to minimize the overheads to taking action.

This means that most of Mark's systems are "just in time" systems. They have you confront small issues that reduce your efficiency to taking action a little bit at a time and often (little and often anyone?). This includes discovery of the right things to do. In Mark's systems, you don't come up with this big chain of dreams and goals and then make a plan and execute on it. GTD also gets at this by focusing on the ground floor first, and then gradually building up the big picture. In this sense, Mark and David agree. However, GTD introduces significantly more infrastructure for the ground floor, whereas Mark argues that such is not necessary, and focuses instead on algorithmic solutions to approaching that complexity in the moment, rather than up front.

GTD was revolutionary at the time for its ground floor focus, compared to something like 7 Habits, but Mark takes it possibly to the most extreme conclusion with a heavy emphasis on "low level systems." (SoPP)

But this means that the way that Mark's systems present themselves, the physically "touchable" points of the system, are all in the list processing elements. The other stuff is abstractly derived from this algorithmic focus. and this means that if you just look at Mark's systems, all you'll see initially is a way to do your to do list. If you haven't understood the framework that Mark is using, then it's very hard to "trust the system" or more accurately, "trust the process." This is where many people stop before they've even begun, because they can't understand how just processing my to do list better would solve all the myriad of issues that they think they have. It's a disconnect in root cause analysis.

In some ways, Mark's earlier systems were easier to get because they had more levers and parts that had clear reasons for existing. What Mark has done over time is figure out how you can solve the same problems that those systems were solving through emergent behavior of a simpler, more refined processing algorithm. In other words, by coming up with a more refined approach, you don't need special operations to deal with specific issues, but those issues are addressed through emergent characteristics of the simplified system. This makes the systems more adaptable and robust, at the cost of it being much harder to see how the system will solve "your problems" if you can't see the big picture.

Mark's intuitive systems are designed to enable you to progressively refine your commitments, take continuous action, and respond to changing needs. The biggest value that comes from the systems is the intuitive way in which the systems are able to help drive you to confront your commitments. Whether they are no list or long list systems, you have to deal with saying yes too often. But it achieves these things through actually doing stuff. It's a slow growth of gradual confrontation and improvement.

This means that, unlike in the case of GTD or BuJo, where you feel like you see the big picture and get a sense of total control, even if that sense of control is actually a bit of a lie, Mark's systems will not make you feel like you're in total control right out of the gate. Worse, as you get confronted with an overly long list of commitments that are beyond your capacity, you have to face the uncomfortable fact that you have to start saying no. Even worse, if you don't understand the framework of Mark's systems, then you'll become discouraged by the fact that Mark's systems didn't magically let you "do everything on your list." I think a lot of people only look at the long list systems as a different way of doing their to do list, rather than as a different philosophy of approaching work in general. To them, it's still a to do list of things they must get done.

The key to Mark's systems, IMO, is the recognition that the list processing is serving not only the purpose of action, but also the purpose of planning and commitment. GTD has an explicit organization element (it's pretty much all organization), whereas a long list system, for instance, appears disorganized, but is actually about progressively refining goals, dreams, and commitments so that you focus in on taking action that is meaningful. The list processing is the means by which the "high level" actions of dealing with the future, which would otherwise be multiple separate processes in GTD, are handled over time, little and often. It's like the Agile Methods approach of "planning by doing."

Planning by doing is very powerful, because it provides some of the most authentic and objective information about your reality, but it can also be very hard to pull off for many people because they don't have the "plan" in front of them, and are instead discovering that plan over time. Many people prefer having a plan which is a lie now rather than taking action to discover a more realistic path without a plan. In both cases you still have a general goal (long term) in mind, but one provides more upfront confidence to the uninitiated.

I say all this to point out that much of what is happening with Mark's systems happens "behind the scenes" in a way that many people aren't trained to recognize or see. When they are confronted with those elements over time, they might not understand why it is happening, and it might manifest as an uncomfortable feeling. That than homing in on this and discovering something, they might feel that the system isn't working, and give up. It's a matter of not knowing what to expect, and not seeing how the process will get them where they need to go.

Thus, Mark's systems don't give the same "feel good" sense as other more explicit systems do early on, and it's harder to see progress being made in the big picture, so one doesn't necessarily feel good, unless the whole framework can be appreciated.

With a system like GTD, when the system starts to break down because of a failure to confront commitments, GTD doesn't really have a good answer, and so people tend to give up, slide off, or fall off the bandwagon. With Mark's systems, the little and often approach (across all dimensions) requires a significant amount of faith and doesn't give the same hit of feel goodness, so that when that discomfort comes in, people will often switch a system, feeling that is easier, and because they get that initial hit of novelty, instead of doing a more uncomfortable root cause analysis. In other words, when the system starts to reveal issues to address, rather than asking the right questions (SoPP) and making adjustments to their commitments and focus, which is really what the systems are designed to confront you on, they think, "I need more than just a way to process lists," and they go on the hunt for something more effective or more explicitly comprehensive.

If I were to summarize this all, it would be that Mark's systems are too deceptively simple in their rules, making it hard for the uninitiated to understand how to engage with the emergent effect of running those systems over time, versus systems that are more explicit in how they deal with various things, even if that makes those other systems more fragile. The solution is, I think, a more clear understanding of the underlying framework that drives these simple rules, thus enabling the right response when the system begins manifesting those big issues, such as, "You're doing too much," or, "You're not who you think you are," or, "You can't do both of these at the same time and succeed," or, "You have conflicting goals," etc.

Simple Scanning is a great example. If you don't know Little and Often, Authorized Commitments, Standing Out, Questioning, or the like, it's hard to appreciate that Simple Scanning is just the mechanism by which you are given the opportunity to apply those principles reliably. It's an aid to abstract thinking.

So what about loyalty to a system *within* Mark's philosophy?

My previous pose describes why I think Mark's systems on the whole are different than other systems, and lays the foundation for why I think there's a strong tendency to "switch around" within Mark's community in general, including with himself.

The short answer, made easy by the above long answer, is that Mark's systems are very simple rules that are really the single point of contact with a whole host of very sophisticated and complex abstract ideas of time management. This simple set of rules are the driver for a load of complex emergent behaviors. This means that any change seems to be a big systems change, and might seem like a lot of jumping around, but might not be as much "disloyalty" as it seems.

With something like GTD, so much of the system is explicit and reified into separate practices on multiple levels of abstraction, that when things aren't working, people will usually tweak some specific aspect here and there. If you look at how people use GTD, you'll find that almost no one does it quite the same, but it's all still considered "GTD" or the same "framework." In fact, there was a big question amongst GTDers of what GTD actually meant, and how to know if you were doing it or not. In fact, under the most liberal definitions, Mark's systems might even be considered GTD.

Thus, from the outside, GTD gives you the impression that there is this large community of people doing GTD. In reality, one might make the claim that the "Mark Forster" community is more cohesive and doing more of the same thing than the GTDers are, even though we often all think of ourselves as doing "different systems." Structurally, there are a lot of inherently stable characteristics of people working in a "Mark Forster" way, even for those who aren't using any of the specific TM systems that Mark has explicated. The same can't necessarily be said for many of the GTD folks, though there are some commonalities.

Furthermore, Mark's list processing systems have to do a lot more than GTD's Next Action lists. GTD has separate processes for exploration, review, project progression, commitment management, high-level goal setting, and so forth. While Mark makes an explicit distinction between Project management, Time Management, and Information management, even if we restrict ourselves to time management, Mark's algorithms are still expected to handle what is handled in many separate processes in GTD in a single process. Furthermore, Mark requires that such systems be as simple as possible. That's a tall order, and in some ways, a much taller order than GTD's process requirements. It's also potentially more powerful. If you can find a simplified process that obviates the need for many other more complex processes, that's a huge win, more so than just improving the efficiency of the complex structure.

I think this explains why there is so much experimentation with systems and why there is the tendency to want to try new systems. But there's another aspect tied to this.

Because of the emergent/intuitive aspects of Mark's systems, it can be really hard to "feel" the sense of progress, and it can be hard to evaluate the hidden aspects of a system to know which one is better. This means that it's natural to swap back and forth across systems for quite a while until the emergent effects become more clear and a more statistical process can come into play that identifies the patterns that are only visible over time, whereas a more explicit system would highlight those aspects directly right away, though with a less refined model.

In other words, it can be really hard to evaluate exactly what is going on in Mark's systems a priori or in isolation, and things only come into more clarity after being able to see things happen over a wider period of time with many systems to compare behaviors against.

So why do so many people seem to gravitate to FVP, including Mark? I myself find myself gravitating to FVP as well, and somewhat strongly reacting against AF (when I tried it) and Simple Scanning (less reaction than AF), and like Mark, I find NQ-FVP particularly easy and appealing.

I think it boils down to a computer science view. If we think about taking action as an algorithm to decide what to do right now, which is what Mark's systems are, that must generate a trail of statistics about our behavior to help us to introspect for the future (a key aspect of intuitive systems to enable dismissal and commitment modulation), we want such a system to be maximally efficient of our mental energy, while at the same time taking the minimal amount of time and effort to use. in other words, minimal RAM and CPU usage. We also have the case that storage is cheap. This is why pen and paper are helpful, because they are cheap storage that increases the number of things we can play with while keeping RAM and CPU usage down (our mental energy).

So let's consider systems that have become very popular and examine some of them in light of this perspetive.

No-list systems such as 5/2 are very much like real-time systems. They have a very small working memory and very small storage requirements. They are extremely efficient, and they can respond to new inputs very rapidly. This frees up a lot of mental energy for taking action, making them capable of having very high throughput. However, they depend almost entirely on how good the input into the system is, meaning that you have to use such systems only in environments that you are able to trust. They don't help you to differentiate priorities in and of themselves except in the data trail that they leave behind. However, this data trail doesn't "feed back" into the system directly, and requires a separate system for handling this. This makes them hard to stand alone without very good systems around it, as Mark has noted. In other words, the system doesn't really have enough features to tackle the mission that Mark's systems have.

AF1 is like a cache-localizing optimization for throughput maximization of instructions. Such a system improves efficiency of action by reducing the total number of things that it has to look at at a single time (the single page). By doing so, it increases the speed of processing of that single page. The problem is that this is a premature optimization that can't handle changing conditions efficiently. In other words, it sacrifices higher level prioritization and goal-setting features in favor of raw throughput. It also complicate the process of commitment refinement for very little benefit. It's a system that is optimized for the wrong things and introduces complexity without benefit. It is an example of the overly engineered computer system that makes the wrong thing go fast. FV is an example of the same sort of thing.

What about Simple Scanning? It's an example of the most simple and naïve computer system that does the job well. It's perfectly suited to doing the job, in that it generates the appropriate trail of statistics, enables good decision making, and can be ramped up or down in execution speed to adapt to changing conditions. It can process data quickly or responsively and can change between these two very easily. This makes it seem like it might be the perfect system.

But Simple Scanning, from a process orientation, has one fatal flaw: it's computationally expensive. Put in computer speak, its cache locality is poor, and it requires excessive computation to achieve its results. That means that it makes poor use of both memory and CPU. The RAM requirements of Simple Scanning are actually very small, but to achieve this, it requires very high CPU usage and it has to read from "hard disk" (paper) all the time.

If you are in a truly dynamic environment in which there is little to no stability in the environment, and you have to make massive course corrections all the time, then Simple Scanning might be the best you can do. This is another way of saying that chaos is expensive to manage. That's because the list itself can never mature in such a way that the various parts of the list are weighted significantly differently enough to optimize.

One perspective we can use to explain this is that a time management system is essentially trying to find the "best" or "first" action out of many actions to take for a single point in time. This is *exactly* equivalent to a sorting activity, and computer sorting is a very well studied problem.

Mark's systems trade a priori sorting in favor of in the moment sorting (GTD actually does this as well, but introduces the organizational overheads on top of that to try to optimize the decision process) using the intuitive standing out principle and introducing the equivalent of preemptive multi-threading into the system (this is what Little and Often is in Computer Operating systems, versus Cooperative multi-threading as used in the Ivy Lee method and others).

If your system is so chaotic that the rank order of tasks to do changes often enough to disrupt your sort order rapidly enough, then the best you can do is to potentially scan through the entire list every time (at worst) to find the best item. This is sort of like a bubble sort. It's computationally expensive, but it can help to produce a trail of the "best choices" in the moment even when you change the ordering of numbers all the time. Simple Scanning does this, with the optimization that your brain is capable of sometimes doing that sorting without needing to scan the entire list. Still, having the option to scan the entire list in your process is required to handle this level of chaos and still "do the right thing" each time you need to pick your next action.

But if you run your systems well, Simple Scanning should eventually help to refine your environment and goals over time so that there is more order, and more stability. This is the list maturation effect that Mark has identified. Assuming that you *do* get yourself into a more stable environment, this means that the rank order of "best" task to do at any given moment will begin to retain stability across multiple actions. The more stable your environment (which includes things like your own energy levels and motivation), the more stable this rank ordering.

Once you reach a certain point of stability, Simple Scanning becomes extremely suboptimal. This is because you are requiring your brain to resort the entire list on every single decision to take a new action. Worse, not only do you need to resort, but you potentially need to pull in data from storage (paper) while you do so (scanning the list). This is like scanning your whole hard drive every time you want to search for a word.

This extra work and effort isn't lost on your brain and psyche. It knows that this is a waste of energy. It knows that it's doing needless work. And thus, it becomes bored. It already knows, but it's being forced to "relearn" what it already knows. It's like getting the same lecture in class over and over again with no new content or too little new content. Students get bored over that stuff and we still get bored over that stuff in our lists once we have achieved some stability.

Moreover, Simple Scanning also is an all or nothing system. You are either committing to do something, or committing to not doing it, in a single step. That's an expensive decision. We are more stochastic than that. This means that we have to exert extra effort on every decision we make through the list, which is what manifests in Mark's observations that you can avoid doing things too easily and won't be driven to finish things well enough. We're not taking advantage of cache locality, data stability, or cpu efficiency.

Enter FVP. The "softening up" effect of FV is that you are able to dot an action more readily in FV or FVP and with less mental commitment than with Simple Scanning. In such, you are making a small commitment now that is less costly. In the future, when you come back to that item, you've already made some commitment to it, and there is a well known psychological effect that such small commitment combined with our naturally tendencies means that it will be easier to just do that thing now rather than to break the system and change our minds and say no. This eliminates one of the major computational expenses of simple scanning, but it's worth noting that this only works in cases where we can have confidence in the stability of the rank order of the list. It's an optimization on the decision process of simple scanning under the assumption that the list rank order will be more stable over time.

FVP also incorporates additional optimizations over FV. By scanning forward through the freshest part of the list, it's able to account for and handle the chaos that might still exist in the system without disrupting the stability of the older parts of the list. This is because as a list matures, the older part of the list will be more rank order stable than the newer part of the list. This means that simple scanning of the forward part of the list will help to prevent the optimizations of the FV preselection of the older parts of the list from becoming invalid. It's a means of preserving rank order stability optimizations.

Furthermore, we can recall how efficient the AF algorithm is from a pure throughput standpoint because of the cache locality features. In other words, there are relatively few items that are in our heads at any given moment with AF, because we are processing a single page. There's also that driving forward effect. FVP's frontal scanning of the forward part of the list is a similar sort of cache optimization. We are able to take advantage of the same sort of things from the AF throughput optimizations, but in the freshest and most meaningful part of the list in terms of where we need that optimization. This means that it takes less mental effort to quickly process that part of the list since it stays in memory better, and we have to "pull from paper storage" less.

The dismissal elements are also more optimized, because by the time we get to older tasks for review again, we have gained more information and insight. This helps to provide the sort of "spaced repetition" elements of psychological practice that would otherwise be less optimal. We can delay examining some of the older parts of the list over time, progressively extending this time to exposure to parts of the list so that by the time we do look at them, they are either very ready to be done, or they will have a tendency to have less import than they once did, and dismissal is easier. This only happens if we have a tendency to naturally extend the time away from those items. Simple Scanning doesn't do this as well, because it will not progressively extend the time away from items on the list in the same way that FVP does.

This means that FVP incorporates a more optimized dismissal function, more optimal decision cost, and applies the benefits of simple scanning flexibility to the most important parts of the list without costing extra to scan older parts of the list that are more stable. This makes it computationally significantly more efficient. It does require more RAM than Simple Scanning, but the benefit of this is that it requires much less expensive storage lookup (paper scanning) than Simple Scanning.

Once we have all of these optimizations in the system, we can also note that these optimizations lose almost none of the advantages of simple scanning *assuming* that the older parts of the list are able to stay stable. It can handle chaos at the front provided that the rank order of the older part of the list stays relatively stable to the new part of the list. If this happens significantly more often than it does not, then FVP will be significantly more efficient than simple scanning while being much more robust than FV.

The use of NQ/standing out for FVP instead of the question is a meta optimization on top of all this by observing the fact that frequent exposure to the list and the front of the list especially will embed sufficient information into our decision process to enable us to rely more on intuition than rational examination for rank order.

All in all, this means that with FVP it is easier to take action on the right things faster with *much* less mental effort. The key factor in FVP's success, IMO, lies in the fact that it optimizes mental energy for the very insignificant trade-off of being slightly "wrong" in its selection every once in a while (this gets worse the less stable/mature the list). The decision cost per action is minimized with very little disadvantage. However, because of the requirement for maturity in the list and environment, it's not surprising that Mark often seems to go from Simple Scanning to FVP, rather than from FVP to Simple Scanning.

I think the tendency to shift off of FVP is simply that FVP can't be perfect, in that it can't solve the problems that we have to solve ourselves. It can only help us to confront those problems at a reasonably optimal time. Because we aren't in fully stable environments, FVP's assumptions will sometimes be wrong, though they should be right way more than they are wrong. And finally, if we forget to leverage FVP to get ourselves into meaningful work, it's easy to get bored and start looking for more novelty. If we study productivity systems, like Mark does, you almost can't get away with saying "FVP is it." You have to keep trying to learn.

I will say that FVP is definitely the most "calming and in control" feeling system that I have used of Mark's, and it is much less mentally taxing than AF or Simple Scanning, and there is much less resistance to taking action in it than in the other long list systems of his that I have tried. The only system with *less* resistance and easier action is the Ivy Lee/Schwab method, which is a bit like FV, except that I am pre-selecting and rewriting a 6-item daily list to be action in order, and I am allowed to rank order this list independent of the main list, and I don't have to select the first item. Because Ivy Lee means you preselect the night before, i get a whole night of sleep meditation on the 6 items I want to pursue. The problem is that Ivy Lee isn't a little and often method and requires scheduled structure around it to deliver the context switching necessary to be responsive, whereas Mark tries to build this responsiveness into FVP. However, pre-selection of tasks in that fashion is absolutely a big win against resistance, and I think a major factor of the ease of doing tasks in FV, and FVP, but is less optimal in Simple Scanning, with AF somewhere in the middle.

Hrm, this line of thinking took up a lot more space than I anticipated. :-)

So many great responses. I’m just digesting the replies to my original post at this point. Have to say that I think that Aaron has certainly hit on some home truths in my experience. I do find that with Marks system I get more done across all areas and I find myself coming back time and again to Mark’s systems over the years. GTD and BUJO do ‘seem’ to offer a more easier view of the landscape and a more ‘ready made’ solution but I tend to take action a lot more consistently with Mark’s systems .. like A LOT MORE!
I think I have been trying to fit Marks long list systems into various pieces of software which are inherently designed for more GTD style approaches. I love Things 3 (Cultured Code) but cannot find any low friction way of using FVP with that. So I go to paper but feel that I miss the overview of a projects list which I can click into which exists in the Things sidebar. And on it goes.....

I recently discovered the ‘Authorised Projects’ concept and am using that as well which helps.
As I say I am digesting the wonderful comments here and hope to be reply soon when I have more constructive thoughts etc. Wonderful discussion.Have not yet come across any productivity forum on the web with this level of insight.

Aaron, what you wrote is absolutely amazing. I am still rereading and digesting but a few thoughts:

1) I am glad you mentioned the hardware (or is it wetware) as a variable. I also wonder about other real-world variables, work/home environment, type of paper/program being used (a real example about this, once I found that Mark uses columns for FVP, I realized what a difference that makes for looking at the earlier dotted tasks.

2) Not only are all people different, but I am different from moment to moment. I've gotten into the routine lately of starting with Simple Scanning at the start of the day, moving into AF once I do a Simple Scan pass, and when I have complete decision fatigue in the afternoon, I move to randomizer. There is something to be said for how an MF long list can be used in a variety of ways.

3) And I wonder about the add-ins, extensions or power-ups (not sure what the metaphor is) that are part of Marks systems, but perhaps not always used. For example, since I came back to AF a few weeks ago, I realize I am doing it so much differently than before, because I am applying Little and Often much more, thus moving through the list and closing out pages much quicker than before. The Little and Often powerup can (and perhaps should) be used for most of MFs systems, and how you apply it changes the system quite a bit.

3) I don't think I saw the following systems in your assessment, DIT, DWM, or RAF. These are all time-based systems for dismissal (or a variant of that) and are quite powerful as well. Please feel free to build your computer metaphor around those!

4) I hope you and Mark add to your list "Develop a book based on these posts" and I hope that stands out soon. A book with you and Mark as co-authors, really diving into the fundamental prionciples and psychology of these systems would be an influential book in multiple fields.

Aaron
I am curious are you pen and paper or digital or hybrid in terms of managing lists etc? Would love to hear about the mechanics of how you lay things out? Like do you keep,your authorised Commitments on a digital list and FVP list on paper for example? Thanks!

Aaron:
Thanks for the details. I gather that you are a computer scientist. I’m intrigued that you are primarily analog. I gather this is mainly for task management? Do you go for everything in one book. BUJO style? How do you handle reminders ? Is it that you have ingrained the habit of checking in with your paper lists throughout the day so that external reminders aren’t needed. Also do you keep a separate long list for work and one for personal commitments ? I work freelance and too have lots of discretionary time. I’m never sure how granular I should go with work project tasks in my long list. I like to see ‘next actions’ in my long list but then the list can become quite long and if that is mixed in with personal commitments then I find it hard to switch off.
As you say I think keeping a limited amount of commitments is key to making it all work. I sometimes wonder if my chronic system app changing is due to the system becoming overwhelmed with the sheer amount of tasks and information I have collected agreed to . I am intrigued by the pure analog approach . Sounds to me like it is an approach where you would need to fully commit to being all in on pen and paper. Your mini essays are are spot on in terms of critical analysis as to why system switching is so common in the ‘productivity space’ ? System switching seems like the elephant in the room which no one talks about. Great thread !

Belacqua:

I think a lot of people feel like they are in a world where everything is changing all the time, but for me, I've worked very hard to eliminate those sources of distraction from my work flow, so I have some luxury with regards to this. I can rely on a mostly stable sort order for my list across multiple days, which is more than others can say. That allows me to use FVP *even* if I move through the list slowly (I move much more slowly through it than Mark does).

I should also note that I'm not being critical of no-list systems. In fact, I currently think I prefer a no-list like No-list FVP or 5/2 compared to FV or AF. They are very fast, and I get some more control over the order of operations better than in AF or FV. But the issue I have with those is that they also require a significant amount of mental energy from me, and they require a lot of structure around them to work as well as they can. That's not a negative, it's just an observation on how you need to use such systems to maximize your value.

I've tried the "Simplest Form" and I like it, but my finding is that with such systems, having to constantly ask myself the big question of "what should I do next?" is the most expensive operation I can ask, because in my world, there's nothing else other than my systems to restrict the possibilities of what I can do. There's zero external structure within my day forcing me to "behave" or focus in on a single thing or area of focus. This leads to a huge decision fatigue because every time I ask that question, I have the potential capacity to do *everything* I could do, from going to sleep to visiting with the kids to doing big hard work, to playing video games, to going for a walk, to eating, to anything. That's just expensive and taxing to ask every 10 minutes to an hour in a day. Most other people have much more structure to their lives I've found than I have, and if you can leverage that structure, you can make your decisions about what to do next cheaper, and that affects the whole system. All of the systems have a baseline "per operation" cost (the unit cost) for running the system, and depending on how expensive that cost is for you in each system, that can affect which system is going to be cheaper and more efficient of your time and energy.

I'm playing around with Mark's response to my question about distractions right now. It's too early to tell whether I agree with his assessment in terms of practical affect on the ground for me, but the general observation that when we pay attention to things we often gain some more control over them is reasonable and sound, I think.

For me, the efficiency gain of not having to think about a portion of the list (and the ability to actually ignore it) for a significant amount of time, but still get back to it as quickly as I want to whenever I feel that it is important to review it, is really big. The ability to "switch back" to an already dotted task without having to actively choose it is also a big psychological win for me. Of course, that doesn't mean that I think the other systems are bad, but simply that I am in an environment which appears to favor the efficiency gains of FVP or otherwise require an external structure like with no-list systems (I actually find the Ivy Lee method the most relaxing and it is a type of no list or daily list, depending on how you look at it, but I'm currently comparing the quality of my work between FVP and Ivy Lee to see which one I like better).

Going back to the original post:

Perhaps we can differentiate between systems and tools. Switching systems might be costly in time and money and learning curve. Switching tools not so much. One could keep up whatever system you're using and add or replace a tool.
Let's say that a list, calendar, schedule, project planning, inbox, are all tools. A system would be a procedure for integrating all of these.
Time management software for the most part is a system that must be learned and might not be very flexible. So switching to it and discarding in a short period could be disruptive and not worth it. I have only kept it one program which is Ecco Pro, and use it mostly for keeping notes. It can outline well, and has all kinds of time management features, but like all of these programs it can get too complicated quickly. I have tried too many computer-based productivity systems, and abandoned too many. For the most part, they are more trouble than they are worth.
I like analog because it is so much more flexible.
Although Mark Forster's methods are called systems here, many of them are list-based, and perhaps better regarded tools, ways to manipulate a list. Mostly, there are no procedures for integrating with anything else. So one can start or drop it and maintain the rest of one's system. Having a few ways to manipulate a list can provide variety. So switching can be a good thing.
It is likely that a good part of one's system is working and doesn't need an overhaul. Perhaps just adding a component or tool or method is all that's needed. I find that I tend to neglect a component, and focus on just one. Just making sure one is keeping up all parts of your system might be all that's needed.

GTD is a system. It likely took years to develop the skills needed, and years to describe it.
It is unlikely a novice can start with this system and right away implement it. A beginner an read a book about how to play the piano, but will not likely be able to sit down and play a concerto. There is a difference between intellectually understanding a skill, and performing that skill, or in this case of GTD, a large set of skills.
Also, a system that works for one individual might be based on that person's personality, and won't work for another.
The original post mentions switching from digital to analog. I have done that too. Sometimes because I need a change. It can be done gradually so there's not much of a cost here. Some things are better done digitally, such as project planning and management, and keeping notes.
Sometimes you have to find out by trial and error. Switching from one analog system to analog system or digital system to digital system- maybe that's different. I like the Bullet Journal or a variations of it because one's system can grow organically. Switching systems might work out if you go to better system, but it can disruptive if it doesn't.

My personal take on switching systems is often to do with friction. Digital solutions are more dangerous, because they are more feature rich. When people switch to paper systems, they are often initially very fruitful because of the simplicity. However, over time this fails because they do need some complexity. A good system has just enough complexity to make the system work for you. Too little complexity and the system fails because it doesn't meet your needs, too much and the friction to use it kills it.

I use a digital system, but a simple one (Things 3). All my projects are in one long list, but in each project are the next actions needed. This is collapsable so I don't need to see all the individual tasks that make up the project. Everything is viewable in one long list and items can be dragged up and down the list. I separate tasks by areas so that work and personal projects/tasks do not collide.

A key area that keeps me using the system is regular review. I had not realised in the past, just how vital this is. You need to know exactly what's in the system, that's why too much complexity is no good. It's also why systems where the lists are way too long fail, because it increases the friction to have to look through such a long list. Extremely long lists often indicate that you've taken on too much or that you're unable to let things go.

Finally, discipline is equally as important in this process. If you want to stop spending too much time on changing systems, then set a date where you review your system. I recommend this be no less than 3 months or preferably 6 months. It also helps to have a project that looks at how well your system is working. I currently have 26 projects on the go plus 63 separate tasks, some of which will become projects. I can review my entire list in less than 5 minutes. This is because I know what everything is and this is very manageable for me.