Get Everything Done

Mark:

Back in 2011 you had some fun revisiting Dreams a bit, but I lost the thread of the experiment and never was able to find your conclusions. Did you do a write up at some point of your revisit after having explored a lot of the other list-based systems? I got the impression that a lot of your interest in list-based systems after Dreams was partly because you found that it was difficult for people to stick with the Dreams method, and so you started to look for a more mechanical and less introspective way of working with your intuition. Is this is an accurate assessment? You say multiple times in response to people exploring dreams that doing the exercises is critical, which makes me think that the "failure mode" for the Dreams method was an apparently easily made resistance to doing the exercises?

Additionally, with your recent AF revisit (http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2021/5/10/revisiting-autofocus.html) I notice that shortly after that you started to take up a new dismissal rule, concluding eventually that the new rule didn't really fundamentally improve AF. However, your goals in your original revisiting experiment seem to have gone unanswered publicly, which was to assess more deeply how well AF was able to "focus" in through intuition on what was really important in one's life.

The obvious connection between AF and Dreams is the desire to allow one's life to emerge via intuition and method. I believe you've written an article on AF specifically about allowing something like an ideal life to emerge intuitively through working the system. This seems, to me, to mirror or reflect the ideas in Dreams about allowing life to happen and leveraging intuition to solve the issue to getting from the present to the future.

Do you have any thoughts on which system you think is more able, given more time and distance from the initial creation of both, to leverage intuition and be sustainably effective? Let's assume for the moment that both are equally easy to implement, since, in my case, the exercises in Dreams are not foreign or scary at all to me, and I'd find them no more difficult than running AF I think.

It seems to me that another way of phrasing this question might be, is it more effective to use a mechanical method to grow a vision intuitively, or to instead use clarity to solve the mechanical details intuitively?

Thanks for the clarifications Mark!

I have had enough success with AF lately to feel rather confident that I could now work that systems fairly well long term if I wanted to. I'm quite curious to see if Dreams creates much of a different effect on me versus using AF or other intuitive long list systems. Time will tell! It's also going to be very interesting driving things based solely on journaling again.

In a purely silly note, Dreams let's me do fun writing with my fountain pens which I find rather fun.

How do you think Dreams compares to some other well known journalling approaches? I'm thinking here of Morning Pages and Future Authoring in particular.

Morning Pages is much less structured. It seems to be very easy to add, and some people seem to get the same sort of benefits of clarity from it that Dreams promotes, but it seems less targeted and more unpredictable to me.

Future Authoring is much more structured, and definitely more rational, in that it goes from free form visionary work to articulating that vision a little more clearly and with more structure, before finally attaching it to micro-habits in the day that will lead to the goal(s). It also has the interesting difference in that it doesn't use a present reality, but it instead assumes that you have a little better sense of your present reality and instead has you plot your ideal future and your "personal hell" that you want to avoid, with the idea that you'll run away from one and run towards the other. It seems to share the idea of living in a day/present and having a long future, but not excessively planning the in-between space.

One thing I'm wondering about Dreams is how well it may be able to provide energy without leading to burnout through a sort of obsessive quality if the pull is "too strong". You get that meditative quality of being in the Zone with AF because of the rules, but they are somewhat limiting so you aren't likely to hyperfocus too much. It seems like the max potential energy cultivation might be stronger with Dreams, but I wonder if there's a failure mode that might occur if you end up with *too* much energy.

Mark:

I've been reading through this blog, the forums, and the book to try to get a feel for the Dreams method. It looks obscenely simple, but it also seems like it is one of those things that if I don't get quite right, I could easily end up highly unproductive (drift mode) instead of the way I'm wanting.

I've read through most of what I could find in the forums and blogs, and I think I've got a pretty good sense of things, but I wonder if you could highlight anything or a few things (in the forum, blog, or just here directly) that you think would be good for me to focus on if I were thinking about trying to make this a long term "productivity method" and not just a short burst of effort and energy to get some clarity and then move to something else (like a long list). What does it take to make this system work efficiently and well in the long term?

Right now, I've focusing my priorities in this order:

1. What's better list.
2. Goal Achievement Method
3. Self-coaching dialogues.

I'm also starting with long term goals, as that's really what matters to me right now.

It really does seem like it's pretty straightforward, but, like AF, I wonder if there are some things that are key to unlocking and watching out for (pitfalls) where many have failed before.

Thanks Mark! I am already seeing how the various components feed into each other. I think the "What's better" list is the hardest for me right now, but I'm getting there. :-)

Mark:

It occurs to me that Dreams is pretty focused on leveraging intuition, but do you think that AF is more or less effective at actually training that intuition? I see how each of the 3 main components of dreams is training a different part of your awareness:

1. GAM is training your ability to recognize a path from your present to your future, as well as trying to get your awareness of the present more accurate. It's also helping to hone your focus in your mind towards a specific reality/objective so that your motivation remains high towards that thing.

2. The What's Better? list helps to hone your sensitivity towards progress on specific goals, specifically to highlight the small wins that represent progress that can often be lost. I think this is sort of like the small win you can mark on your long list by doing just a little something on the list. It feels good and represents progress when you can at least cross it off the list, even if you re-enter it.

3. The Dialoguing hopefully helps you to raise your internal awareness and help to move you from unclear intent towards clear intent, as well as potentially unsticking some resistance points that you might have.

How do you think this compare to AF's approach to training your intuition and understanding?

Mark:

<<But AF is intended to be used at all levels of tasks. For example, tasks which I frequently use are variations of "Think about...", "What do I want out of...?", "Who is my ideal customer?", "What should I be aiming at in ten years time?", "Plan Conference" etc.. Other lower level tasks grow out of these.>>

I'd say this is probably one of the key differentiators of your systems versus others, and it's, IMO, one of the main reasons to actually use a "Mark Forster" style system over other popular approaches. I actually think this little feature in your systems doesn't get enough attention.

I think a lot of people try to just use your long list systems as a way of processing their to do lists that are created or informed via other systems' ideas of what a list should be. I think that misses the point a little bit.

In systems like GTD that require your main todo lists to be a list of physical next actions, the system has to become more complicated to handle all the ancillary stuff that is needed to keep you focused and on target. So you end up with the Weekly Review and Projects lists and the capture phase and the processing phase and all sorts of stuff to account for the fact that our primary lists aren't allowed to have any of that information in it. The same goes for an Ivy Lee list the way most people use it, or MITs, or Kanban, or time-boxing or all sorts of other stuff. The emphasis in these other systems is to have separate meta-analysis processes and to restrict the todo list as much as possible to strictly "next action" oriented stuff.

But if you have a slightly more sophisticated system for processing your list, you can then introduce interesting things onto that list that you might not otherwise be able to in another system. This is probably my favorite aspect of long list systems. You are able to encode other processes that you might need to do as different tasks of different levels and quality into your long list and leverage the list processing system to enable you to engage with those other processes "in list". I find that this encourages a more dynamic and balanced approach to handling different "levels" of analysis in your life.

For example, one of the hardest aspects of GTD for many people is the weekly review, but the weekly review is critical to the long term success of GTD systems. However, you can essentially put a bunch of micro-style weekly reviews into a MF long list system and tackle them little and often. That is more sustainable for most people and moreover, encourages a more dynamic and flexible engagement with the higher level stuff in your life than you might get from just doing the weekly review.