Get Everything Done

In previous discussions on No List systems relative to Long List systems, c. 2016, Mark has made some assertions about what he would expect or not expect to go onto a catch-all list. At the time, for example, he made a comment that one wouldn't necessarily put every homework assignment into a catch all list, but rather, something like "Do Homework" and then have a separate list of assignments along with, potentially, a diary/schedule of their various due dates and a bunch of other information.

This has struck me as a little incongruent with what, at least to me, seems like the main selling point of using a long list system: a long list system is supposed to be comprehensive, and particularly, a major point as I read it is its "selling point" as a simplified system for managing what otherwise is managed through more complex systems. Part of that simplicity is the idea, to me, of *reducing* and not increasing the number of tools necessary to get the job done and their complexity.

So, to be concrete, I'd like to highlight three examples, GTD, No List, and a Long List.

Let's take this "assignment" question or one like it, where you have things that you want to get done, but are discretionary tasks, but which represent more time commitment than can be "done now" even if you were to just do a little bit (without being useless wastes of time).


In GTD, you'd have:

* An inbox where new assignments queue up to be processed
* tickler file where your due dates might go
* project list containing your various homework assignments/classes
* class notes
* A context list of next actions containing each next step for each assignment/class.

I am assuming that we are only using a single context for "@Homework" here to indicate that you are able to do home. I'm using a specific context list here because it might represent a specific technique that a GTDer might use to implement time-boxing based contexts. It could go into a bigger list, but if I were doing GTD, I'd probably set it up this way.

So, how would you start taking action on things? Well, in this, you might schedule time to work on your homework or you would use your intuition to guide you and you'd decide to do homework at some point, possibly setting a timer to do the work. Then you'd start picking off items in your NA list based on intuition and what feels right (equivalent to simple scanning).


In No List, you'd have:

* An assignments list with due dates
* A calendar with due dates and maybe some reminders set for when you want to start working on a given assignment (there simply isn't time to start doing a little work on each immediately when you receive the assignment, even for the same day).
* Your commitments list
* class notes
* Your chosen No List system

In this system, you might wake up, review your calendar, and then at some point in the day, Homework would probably end up on your list and you'd start working, going off of your assignments list. Or maybe not. In my case, "Homework" would never end up on the list, and even when I worked without a list and without a "No List", that just didn't happen. What instead happened is I would think of a specific project that I wanted to work on, a specific paper, or some other specific item that I wanted to do, and I would start work on that. This is how it would go for me.

Thus, for me with a No List system, I probably *wouldn't* have an assignments list. All I would have are the assignment due dates listed in a calendar and maybe any additional information in my class notes. This would mean that the above No List system would be:

* A calendar with due dates
* Your commitments list
* class notes
* Your chosen No List system

Compared to GTD, this is a strictly simpler system with less overhead to manage the work successfully, even on the mental side.


In a long list, what would happen if we took Mark's approach that he mentions in 2016?

* An assignments list with due dates
* A calendar with due dates and maybe some reminders set for when you want to start working on a given assignment (there simply isn't time to start doing a little work on each immediately when you receive the assignment, even for the same day).
* Your commitments list
* class notes
* Your long list with "Homework" somewhere on it

But this system suffers the same issue with the No List I first laid out. "Homework" is one of those items on a list that's at the wrong level. I'd never want to "Do Homework". Moreover, it means that now I not only have a calendar, but also a list of assignments, as well as a long list of things, and my class notes. That's a lot of places where information is stored. Even worse, it means that the main source of my inspiration to do things is a long list that has items on it that are not conducive to me wanting to do the work. This is based on Mark's comment about not actually putting individual assignments and next actions on the long list (he makes comments like this about not putting a lot of stuff on long lists, and expecting instead to put them on *other* lists).

But that seems counter to the "advertising" for a long list, which to me, feels like the answer to the long list solution should be more comprehensive with less lists, an "all in one" solution. Maybe like this:

* A calendar with appointments and assignment due dates
* Your long list where you entered your assignments with their due dates the moment you learned about them in class

In this system, you probably don't even need to look at the calendar. Provided that your long list system gets you to look at and consider the assignments regularly enough, you'll see the due dates and be able to action them individually at that point. Additionally, because there's room in the long list for more info, you could put sufficient information that you probably wouldn't have to make any annotations in your class notes at all to make things work, whereas you probably would in the other systems. The selling points here are:

* You don't have to maintain a separate inbox
* You don't have to remember or maintain different locations for where to put "incoming work".
* You don't have to constantly look at the calendar or track multiple lists
* You don't have to maintain and constantly review a secondary commitments list
* You don't have to "decide" to do homework, you just have to decide to do a specific assignment (more concrete, physical, and therefore more likely to be less resisted)
* More conducive to doing a little and often (it's mentally easier to do a little on one assignment than "a little homework" [what does that even mean?])

But this is precisely what Mark advocated against a while back. On the other hand, it replaces the most number of additional book keeping and organizational systems with a single one to manage the same information and state/work.


There's another aspect to this: value. In the "long list one for all" design I mention above, there's clear "value" in the long list in terms of the information and options it is presenting you. It's giving you data that you can work off of without having to recall it from memory. It's presenting you with concrete action.

But let's say you only have things like "Do Homework" on the list instead of the actual assignments. What value is the list delivering at that point? Such a list comes down to more like a jumping off list from which you decide which list of more concrete actions you might do. I am aware that Mark has mentioned before about putting tasks at various different levels on a single long list, but in this case, I'm considering the case for a list driven by the ideas implied by Mark's comments about the sample assignment tasks. Such a list in the extreme might look like:

* Homework
* Morning Routine
* Errands
* Food
* Evening Routine
* Work
* Family
* Play
* Hobbies

This list reads more like a commitments list than a list of tasks, or a list of contexts in the GTD sense. Moreover, you might need to look at a separate list to take action on any of these items, a very abstract notion that puts a lot of distance and mental overhead and book keeping between you and your work.

What's the value in such a list? Well, it certainly isn't without value, but I'd be hard pressed to argue that it is simpler in toto than either the GTD or No List approaches mentioned above, and I'd also be hard pressed to argue for its use over just "no system at all". At this level of resolution, you might as well just as yourself, what type of work do I want to do right now? And then move on to your specific lists. That's in fact exactly how GTD works, in that you first ask yourself the type of work you can do, and then go to the context associated with that type of work so that you can begin taking action off of the next action list for that context.

Put in this perspective, having a long list doesn't actually reduce the number of tools, systems, or locations for information, but rather *increases* is by adding another layer on top of additional lists and the like. But a selling point, IMO, for long lists is supposed to be the capacity for them to *remove* the need for other systems. If a long list is just another addition on top of other systems that you assume have to be in place already, like a list of assignments, then that greatly reduces the utility of the system, because it's basically just middle management instead of actually replacing and enhancing the efficiency of work that was being done less efficiently by other systems. Such a strategy is actually more complex than the GTD set up, not less.


Thus, I find it a little confusing when I see some of Mark's explorations of various ideas make comments about assuming that lots of other lists exist for work, and that you just "decide" to go to those lists based on your long list. To me, this seems obscenely complex. I can totally see the advantage if you simplify your set of systems and reduce your tools so that you need fewer system and tools to do the same work and to do it better and more consistently. But a "list of lists" used to decide what lists you're going to look at next just adds more systems and overhead that doesn't seem necessary at all. You can easily decide whether your going to work off of some list or the other, there's no need to have a list of your lists to decide what type of work you want to do. The idea of needing a list for this type of work surprises me, especially if people find that sort of list valuable. I suspect that the vast majority of people find a long list valuable precisely because they can put things into that list *instead* of putting them in some other list, not because it's an additional added list for them to work on top of lists they are already expected to maintain.

Just as another example of this, in his no list comments about "commitments to other people" Mark has said that he wouldn't generally need reminders for those commitments, and that he would just get on with them. But that seems very hard to manage in real life. Take for instance going to a conference. If I were using a no list system, I'd need to keep a list of all the commitments and ideas that I collect during dinners and hallway chats. I can't action any of those at the time, but I could get 15+ different contacts and ideas that I need to explore at some point in the future. There's no way I will remember even 1 of those. The promise of a long list is that I can write them once in my long list and be done with it, the system will handle the rest, but if I were to treat those like the assignments, Mark would appear to have me writing a separate list to manage those things instead of putting them directly in the list. In the No List, I would have to have some way to maintain a list of these things, and a point/routine in which I processed them into reminders of when I thought I might have time to look at them and take care of them (I certainly have no time to do so during the conference, as I am busy talking with people, generating ideas, and working on slides for a talk, so they all have to be done up to a week later, and no earlier), which would have to go somewhere to remind to consider and look at them. This would almost certainly have to be a list or items on my calendar as specific reminders to prompt me to look at this thing at some point.

But at that point, you've got a list of maybe 20 - 40 things to look at, which looks awfully like a long list except that I've simply hidden it away somewhere so that I don't look at it all the time. At that point, it has the same issues as "Do Homework" does as a task. It's unlikely that I'll want to do it, even though I really do need to do it. It's just at the wrong level. The calendar option allows you to be reminded with more concrete elements, but they'll almost always come at the wrong time because you can't predict the future. If I go the route of putting "Review conference ideas" on my No list at some point, am I *really* doing a No List? It's more like I'm just using a no list to spawn off to a bunch of long lists, which doesn't feel very No Listy, and in fact, I probably wouldn't need any no-list besides my existing lists to let me get on with things if that were the case. Why do I need a list to tell me to look over my lists? It seems to me that often the end result of no list is simply to push all of what might have gone into the long list into a bunch of other lists, or onto the calendar instead of onto the list. Surely there could be advantages to that (I actually think there are quite a few advantages), but if comments like I've mentioned above are taken through, then you would still be doing this even with a long list, which, at some point, seems to defeat the whole point of a long list. That just seems...inefficient to me.


Another example of this would be something like Email. In a long list system, just having "email" on your list is a little like having a long list that just points to another list. You don't get a lot of sense of your work in the long list at that point. Instead, if "Email" meant specifically looking at and processing new emails, which resulted in any emails you wanted to reply to at length going onto your list to action with the rest of your work, then "Email" would be just a quick processing step, and wouldn't involve any long replies. But just having "Email" on the list seems somewhat counter-intuitive to making your long list a true "catch-all". I don't want to decide to do email and then have to decide again amongst a bunch of emails, I want to see what emails I could respond to on my list, because then I have better clarity about what needs responding to in the context of the rest of my work. At least, that's the apparent draw of a long list system to me.