Get Everything Done

Personally, I've found it helpful to have long range vision like goals that help to drive direction and allow me to answer the question of, "Should I commit my time to this thing?" However, outside of that, I've not found it helpful to have many if any intermediate goals, except maybe one or two concrete objectives that I want to shoot for on a regular basis. My experience suggests that these intermediate goals change so often that it's not worth having them down too concretely.

So, short term and very long term goals seem to be the ideal. Put another way, I'm a "Plan less" sort of person. Instead, I think what seems to be better is ensuring that you have some way of consistently taking action on an area or commitment that you want to progress on. That is, you start with a "Where is the general direction I want to go?" and then ask, "What are the immediate actionable things I should do every day/week that will get me moving in that direction?" Another way of asking that would be, "What is the next step in that direction?"

This incorporates into a Mark Forster style in a few ways. It's obviously quite compatible with Little and Often and the task focused nature of many of his systems. You simply put the next step into your list and start working it, raising or lowering the resolution as necessary to make it useful. As you continue doing that work, you just ask yourself periodically whether you want to change direction or not? That's easily accomplished as a part of weeding/dismissed items review in Mark's systems.

The important thing here is staying action focused rather than "plan focused".

Finally, there's a little and often overlooked (*snicker*, see what I did there?) part of Mark's advice that I think is critical for some people. Specifically, if you are in a creative role where it's your job to spend a lot of time working on a deep problem (such as writing a book, solving math problems, architectural level systems design, art, &c.), Mark has mentioned before that often times such things are better done "off list" at a specific, protected time and space, so that you have an area of deep focus. Thus, rather than writing that book by waiting for it to trigger for you on your task list, you would just work towards building a habit where there is a time in your day where the only thing you do is that thing, even if, for instance, you might end up doing nothing as an alternative to working on that thing.

I think this is sometimes the key habit that has to be incorporated to tackle some bigger and more aspirational aspects of our lives. I think some people can also do this well by putting it into their lists, but it is important not to limit yourself to *only* looking at that option for some things. Sometimes, things are better worked by giving them a special time and place.

As an example of myself, I have been so aggressive at pruning my life and commitments that I have a tiny list of "todos" that are essentially more or less irrelevant. I can do them whenever I feel like and they don't really matter that much. Instead, I have a very large "One Thing" that drives my commitments and intentions. If I put this on my list, it would be pretty much the only thing I should work on most of the day (or at least, a large portion of my work day). So it's not even worth putting on the list where I might be tempted to resist it.

Instead, I have a morning routine that says, do X, then Y, then Z, and then this One Thing. I am not supposed to let myself do anything else but those things until the One Thing is done being worked on for the day. I think this is likely more effective than trying to wait until I feel like doing the one thing.

Now, I'm not perfect at this, but because I know that I'm not supposed to do these other things before I start on that one thing, I can let myself sit with the feelings when I find myself trying to veer off that habit chain, and spend some time processing why it's happening, which raises my awareness and makes it easier for me to do work.

I think planning has been shown to give you a sense of control, but I think in the end that sense of control isn't worth the cost of planning, as I mentioned in more detail above. It's extremely popular to talk about lots of goal oriented planning, but when it comes down to it, I don't think the intermediate level goals matter that much. What matters is where you want to go, and how you plan to take action regularly to get there.

All goals inevitably come back to your daily allotment of time. How are you going to spend that time each day? Assuming you already know what your goals are, then it's simply determining if you can fit that into the time that you have.

If you have some project that you think you should care more about doing than is showing up on your list, then simply rewriting the task in a manner that will trigger more action (usually being more specific and actionable) is probably the way to address that. Taking some action on a task can include clarifying what you want to do next for a task/project. If I have "Write book" on my list, maybe the first little and often thing to do is to sit with that task and think about why I'm not doing it. And then maybe I'll realize that I don't know what I want the book to be about, so then I add "Brainstorm idea for book" into my list. And that's it. If the problem with a task is that you aren't taking action on a task, then maybe the first thing to do with that project/task is to ask why it's not moving.

So, again, that's just another variation on the theme: you need a direction (goal), and then you need a next step. Everything in between is probably unnecessary and may not be of any benefit at all.

A lot of books on productivity and life management are more about making yourself feel better with your life, versus actually accomplishing anything with your life. The two are not the same thing.

Big upfront planning is rarely worth the effort.

Some people do have trouble knowing what it is they want. In those cases, Mark Forster's systems can help provide a more gradual and less structured approach to trying to allow those goals and desires to emerge over time through incremental, versus all at once, reflection. By putting all sorts of stuff on the list, you can see what moves and what doesn't, and then you can start to introspect on the things that aren't moving, resulting in them either being dismissed or reworked to enable forward motion. And things that are moving forward but that you don't want to move forward or think are moving forward too fast you can deal with somehow.

The thing that Mark's systems don't do, and which no system can do, is to somehow get you to move forward on things that you value but are afraid of, without having to face your fears and learn how to deal with them. The system can highlight your fear, and bring fear's manifestations to the forefront, but in the end you have to deal with it.

I think a lot of people seek out systems and productivity guidance because they are looking for something that will take away the fear and allow them to do things without the pain of dealing with that fear or having to feel that sense of chaos and lack of control that comes with doing anything new and growth oriented. They want the system to remove their fear without them having to actually deal with it.

*If* your primary problem is one of organization, and it is a lack of organization that is causing uncertainty and fear because you don't know what's going on in your life, then a system can help with that. However, once you get your life even a little bit organized to the point that you can at least see what you want to do and what your big things to move forward are, the systems can only shine a light on the fear, and they can't remove it.

And when it comes down to procrastination and why we don't take action on things, it's usually because of fear, whether little or big.

One place where intermediate planning can help is where it's very difficult for you to identify what the immediate actions to take are that matter the most for achieving the goal. In that case, it might be necessary for you to progressively break a complex goal down into intermediate steps in order to understand what your next step is. There are a few models for doing this such as Allen's Natural Planning and others. One that I find useful is Brendon Burchard's idea of identifying the five big steps to get from where you are to where you want to go.

I like the big five steps idea because sometimes people will get caught up in thinking they need to do a bunch of things, and they'll end up doing all the little things that are tangentially related to their goal, but not the primary thing that will actually take them to their goal. As an example, some people will do a lot of work reading about writing a book, or about how to market the book or publish it or how to do this or that, when really, the first step in the five big steps might just be "write the book". I know more than one person has said that they struggled with writing a book because it didn't click with them that the first thing they really needed to do was just to sit down and write a book.

In such cases, I think it makes sense to do whatever you need to do to get clear on what action you have to take to get to the goal, or at least get closer to the end goal. After that, I'm not sure how valuable the rest of the planning work is, once you are making progress consistently.