Get Everything Done

I had never seen this before, so it made for a wild read for me. Thanks for sharing! Very interesting, to say the least, though I'm not sure if the method itself is interesting or the dedication to it.

Read in a little more detail around his system, and I have to admit that I actually came up with something similar to try to do things years ago. I remember that it actually didn't work poorly at all for the most part.

The idea of driving your life through a flexible schedule (something I didn't have back then) and a set of task lists for each context/block of time that are strictly and "automatically" organized is fundamentally compelling to me on some level. It's about as close to "GPS automaticity" as I can imagine a practical system being. I'm also a big fan of spaced repetition as a fundamental technique.

I think for me, though, the hard part comes in what evaluation metric you choose to use to do your ordering. I'm in a stable enough environment that I find I have a pretty strong ordering sense that remains more or less the same day to day for my work, and so a chain of tasks in a certain order will work well for me, but I can't articulate exactly a numerical value of why this matters more than that based on monetary value. Maybe I should, but that would also require me to use software to make it work practically, and I'm not a fan of that.

Letting my intuition control that ordering works more comfortably (maybe not better) for me at the moment, but I think a lot of people might not feel comfortable with that sort of tasklist. I still think it's a cool idea and I like the way in which the decision making is sort of proxied out of your control a little bit.

It may look like value / time priority is lacking in intuition and relying too much on the rational side, but I don't think that's true. Instead, if you simply used your gut to build those values (and that's all you really can do), then you're essentially just reifying your intuition, which might actually be an easier way to access your intuition, but maybe not.

Charles:

<<Aaron, what caused you to leave that system you devised years ago?>>

Hard to say, but I think at least the following played into it:

* The impression that there was something better out there
* Shiny object syndrom
* I think it was hard to "have faith" in my rankings
* It was hard to coordinate my own sense of what I should be doing with other people
* It was very hard to keep any sort of micro schedule
* I didn't have the technology of a flexible schedule at the time to enable me to "adapt" easily
* I never found a pen and paper way to do this for my whole list that felt good
* I started to greatly prefer pen and paper over digital for such things

Now that I have more experience, I think I could make this work in pen and paper, and I think my valuations also might be better.

I wonder whether I would consider it any better now, though. I think there's a pretty good argument to be made that too much up-front ranking and prioritizing might not be a good optimization of your time. I think I would need to figure out:

1. Are the priorities stable enough over time?
2. Do I still need to review the task list often, and if so, how often?

I'm actually already doing something kind of like the above, but with the benefits of some experience behind me.

1. I divide my day into four distinct phases: Wake, Work, Home, and Relax.
2. Each phase has a checklist routine to follow for that phase. This is an ordered set of things to do in that phase. Importantly, it's only an ordered checklist, without specific times or dates associated with it.
3. Within my Work and Home phases, I start them with Ivy Lee lists and end them with a planning phase where I review my calendar/notes/tasks/inboxes to identify the next day's Ivy Lee list.
4. The goal is to proceed more or less in order through each of the items on the list each day.

Basically, I have established an ordered routine for my day with specific points in time where I do a prioritized list of things. I only prioritize the next 6 biggest things I want to focus on, and I go through them from top to bottom in order, making sure each one is complete before going on to the next.

This means that in theory, for the whole next day, I have a completely ordered day and so I have no question in the day about what the "next" item on my list is.

The important insight for myself as to why this is working right now when other schedules, such as time-blocking and time boxing haven't worked is because it gives me the relaxation of having a schedule, without the specific problem of having to execute that schedule in a specific time frame. That means I get the benefits of the schedule (for me) without the part that I have the hardest time with.

Instead, what I can generally do is then get a sense of how much time I have in the day, and then begin to dynamically adjust my time throughout the day that I spend on a given task to more or less end the day roughly around where I want. I am able to do this more consistently with this method than with other forms of schedules, but it's still not perfect, which is what I'm working on right now.

I still have a tendency to speend too much time on some things at the end of the day, but I think the issue with this is twofold:

1. I neglect to simply write the thing that I might be distracted with down into my list so that I can pick it up at a later date rather than chasing it right now.
2. I still suffer some level of FOMO if I feel like I'm stopping a task too early.

Fortunately, I've noticed that this is lessening, and even in this chaos, I am getting a signifcant amount of work done and I am able to manage my obligations and even take on a few new ones effectively.

I've particularly found writing down my distractions to do later to be a really powerful concept. I think Mark has mentioned it before and it is a staple of the long list systems, and I find that it works really well.

In relation to SuperMemo and the like, I notice that the above arrangement of my day actually follows the "Creativity Cycle" that is described in his wiki, and the schedule is something like it too, except that I'm relying on myself to do the dynamic reallocation of the schedule rather than a computer. The schedule I have is arranged so that I try to do my most important and brain taxing work first, and then allow other things that might not be as pressing or matter as much to me fall down at the end of the day if I want to, thus giving more time to be "taken in" by the important stuff, rather than losing the whole day to something else that I won't be happy with at the end of the day. If something small needs to get done, then I can still put it on the Ivy Lee list and prioritize it, but I can also make sure that I make time for the big stuff.

So, in a way, I guess you could say I'm coming back around to this method, but the biggest issue I have is my faith and confidence in a total ordering solution as well as a digital computation solution. I am currently finding the ability to change the priorities each day to be a good level of responsiveness fo rme, and helps to reduce the amount of time that I need to review a list, but also gives me enough time to account for misapprehending my speed at which I am accomplishing some big work (which is often theoretical and hard to predict in advance), so that I can bump something up the priority list easily, which would be harder to do in the above tasklist system, IMO, without breaking the GPS-like nature of it.

Right now, I still face some issues with facing resistance to my routine, but I don't think that has anything to do with the routine in principle, but more about making slight changes to the routine so that they align with what I really want out of the day. I generally am doing that every month or so to assess how I'm liking the ordering and seeing if there are patterns where I'm always breaking with my routine and what ordering I might like better.

I find that when I'm using Mark's long list systems, I have a tendency to have a number of tasks that I prefer to group and cluster, and do at the same time all the time, I've found that it just makes sense to put those into a checklist routine since they are so stable from day to day. That cuts out a huge majority of the task churning on any list I make.

So, for me, probably the nicest thing to have is to be able to look at a list and, without thinking about it, know what the next thing to do is, and be relatively happy that it is there. That's currently what I'm trying to aim for, and I think what the SuperMemo author's tasklist idea is also aiming for. Some people may find that restrictive, but I think it's a pretty empowering feeling when it works.