Get Everything Done

I'm using a composition book and using it for my long list. I completed one composition book for the month of October. I started a new composition book for the month of November. The October list has 30 active pages left. Some pages only have an item or two left. The November list has 17 active pages. I am starting the long list as a catch-all list and the items are very granular.
Question: is there any way to go back and forth between these two lists? Such as one item from one list and then an item from the other list? Or is there a Mark Forster method that would go with this? That has an old list and a new list perhaps? Both lists are quite long now so I don't think I can just process the old list until I get done with it or I'll never get to the new list.

Or I could have a time limit for one book and the other eventually I want to archive the October book. I have noticed when I start a new composition book eventually I don't even look at the old book so I'll need to transfer items over if I want to keep on referring to it.

You could simply consolidate the old list into the new list, and discard the old notebook. That'd be easiest.

Or simply dismiss the old tasks. If they're important, they'll come back to your attention.

Another time-tested method is to put a task in the new notebook to "Check old notebook for tasks", do some work in the old book, then cross out that task in the new book and re-enter the task at the end of the list.

Thanks Mike for your response. I have eliminated some pages in the old notebook by rewriting items at the end of the old notebook if they haven't been actioned yet and then cross out the pages. However I still have too many tasks in the old notebook so it would take a long time to transfer over. Right now I'm finding that two items in the old book to one item in the new book is dealing with the old book items faster. I've also tried one item and the old one in the new

If I take action on the old notebook item I will then rewrite it in the new notebook.

As long as I don't add any new items to the old October notebook it is now a closed list. The new November notebook is an open list. It occurred to me that any items older than October is also closed. Perhaps there is some dynamic here other than dismissing them where there's some motivation to get some of these done rather than just having sitting on a Sunday maybe list.

I am having good success with the ratio 2:1, old notebook:new notebook. I keep a running tally. I have reduced the active pages in the old notebook from 40 pages to 25 pages in an hour or two. I have to put a line through the item in the old notebook, and either delete, do - and maybe transfer to the new notebook, or defer - put on a future date.

I have reduced the pages in the old October notebook to 12 pages. I have searched the forum for "old list" and "new list" and have discovered so many good posts on this. (Might every new question have already be answered?) I started using the method AF4, and it is working well. The old October notebook is the Backlog, and the new November notebook is the Active List.

Regarding my old October notebook: I was able to reduce it to 30 items on 4 pages. Eventually I got tired of reviewing it. For November, I have been keeping a two page spread for each week in November - it is working better than a planner. To reduce the number of active pages, I have transferred items to the end of the list from pages with only 1, 2, or 3 items. I have been using a long list using Simple Scanning; when I use a short list, I put it at the end of the long list. I sometimes will transfer items to the end of the list without doing them, and then use FV/FVP on them. On the last page I keep a calendar of December, one line for each date. November is drawing to a close, and I think I will start a new notebook for December.

However, one does not have as much motivation to weed lists using Simple Scanning, and trying to weed lists that are a month long, using Old List/New List - the Old List is so long. At the end of a month is a good time to weed lists, and try to finish tasks, but it seems that a weekly interval is even better. Maybe I will try the Old List/New List, AF4, using the previous week as the Old List.

It is simple to always have one point of entry - at the end of list - and use only one notebook. The long list is very good for repeating items, or fast moving items over the course of a few days.
However, I am still not making as much progress on broader areas or longer term projects, and those tend to remain on the long list. I tried transferring those to another notebook, but I rarely looked at the notebook (could it be that I know these are more difficult?).

The weekly two-page spread I keep in the front of the notebook, and use to transfer items for future dates; that reduces the long list. I keep an index of page numbers in the very front, and when I finish the page, and I put an X through the page number. If I make a collection of items (as in a Bullet Journal, I make sparing use of collections, though, as it reduces the speed of scanning), I record it on the page in the front by the page number.

I think it was a mistake to put the the harder, longer term projects in another notebook, as it just made it easier to ignore them. Is there a way to put in the same notebook? I could use a page for projects for the month, and page for a each week projects, but where to put the project notes? That is why I put them in another notebook, so there would be room for the notes.

I have used a monthly page and weekly page before, but then don't refer to them, or don't accomplish what's on the list.
It is possible that these need to be on a separate track using a different method than the long list.
These items tend to need more thought and time over a period of weeks, and don't necessarily get actioned on a daily basis.

Hi Mark H, It's fascinating to see how other people navigate their way through various systems, and I would be interested in hearing how your system works out in the longer term.

I'm drawn to the idea of having separate lists for various areas, rather than one long list. I find that having one long list which contains everything from the sublime to the ridiculous makes it very hard to just get on with the tasks and projects that would really make a huge difference in my life. I know in my head what I should be working on, but I become overwhelmed with choice, and burdened with perfectionism, so that I end up doing a lot, but not necessarily what would be in my best interests.

A (very) long time ago, when I was at school, we all had a Homework Notebook, with a section for each area where we noted our tasks to be done, and I found that highly motivating. It would mean a bit more overhead to allocate each task to its relevant area than to just capture everything on one long list, but it might be worth it.

When it comes to pruning and reviewing your work to ensure that you are not keeping things around that shouldn't be kept, or are on top of things that are really important, I think the BuJo work has done the most in terms of mechanizing this into something repeatable, personally.

GTD prescribes a Weekly Review, but the problem is that people can easily choose not to do that. With MF-style long lists, you can add pruning actions to your list, or you can use a system that has built-in dismissal, but people tend to build up some level of resistance to either one over time.

Bullet Journaling, on the other hand, has, IMO, a very gentle form of pressure that forces a review and encourages, but doesn't demand, pruning. Because you write out all of your spreads, and you carry forward tasks from month to month by rewriting in a physical notebook, you don't have tasks spread all over the place like with a traditional long list, but you also need to review your items all the time and explicitly decide, at least once a month, whether to carry items forward, dismiss them, or schedule them for some other time. This explicitly DDD-style decision making each month isn't just prescribed, but you can't really do BuJo in the traditional sense without doing this practice, so you're greatly incentivized to do it. As the creator says, it's a mindfulness practice disguised as a productivity system.

With Weekly spreads, you can incorporate this same review habit into a Weekly cadence if you want, and the same goes for a daily practice by introducing something like an Ivy Lee style daily list.

For myself, I continue to return to using a single daily list of limited quantity (I vary from a single "Frog" item to 6-items a la Ivy Lee) written the night before. I find that this greatly helps the choice paradox, especially if I write these tasks out in order, so I am not even deciding between the tasks. Sometimes, this means that I procrastinate a little bit, but if that's my only "anchor", then I have to come back to it eventually or just completely and intentionally avoid the list. I find it's easier dealing with that battle, especially if you write out the work to be done the night before and sleep on it.

Of course, having a long list of everything to pull from is really desirable for populating this list. It's a little like the 3T + Feeder system that Mark has used in the past.

For myself, what I do is to pay careful attention to items that seem to be languishing on the list, and I recognize either that they aren't going to be done, or that I want to do them, but they aren't the thing that is active at the moment. In that case, I'm okay with putting them on a "Future" list. The idea being that this list is more like an abstract, higher level list of outcomes that I might like to achieve at some point in the future, but that aren't active commitments. Then, this leaves me to move more quickly on the list that represents my active commitments at the moment. You all will, I am sure, recognize this as just an application of the GTD Someday/Maybe list.

This has, so far, been the lowest friction system that I've used, but of course I never feel quite satisfied with it, because my work still doesn't progress as fast as I want, nor do I totally eliminate all of the bad forms of procrastination that I may have, but a lot of that is undoubtedly more psychological than anything.

Margaret1,
Thanks for your post. I have tried to have several lists. Sometimes I do make a short list of things to do in an hour or so, that will not get repeated. I was using short lists and daily lists, but I was having trouble organizing all the undone items, and all the lists. I have 3 jobs, and I have tried to break them down into separate lists, but it doesn't work - probably because the work comes to me or is done at all times of the day and week.

Aaron,
Thanks for your post.

My old October notebook/new November notebook - yes, I was reviewing the month, and transferring items from one month to another. I transferred when I took action on them starting at the new month. I have a whole slew of old composition books, and I think it would be helpful if each composition book was confined to one month, it would help to organize them. Also, if all the open items are in the back rather than scattered throughout, it is easier to spot them and review them later. And there is a motivation moving to a new month and a new notebook to weed items.

I am familiar with the Bullet Journal - I have two books on it. I am not familiar with DDD. What does that mean?

The long list of MF is messier, but has more flexibility than some of the methods of the Bullet Journals. There is a temptation is over-organize with these bullet journals, and can lead to frustration. Also, how would one work the method of crossing out tasks when actioned, and rewriting them, MF style? In the Bullet Journal, items are transferred whether actioned or not.

A question is what is the working list? If it is the long list, then the advantage is you are constantly reviewing items, and noticing them, but eventually there is too many to review.
One can draw from the long list, and make a daily list, and work from that - then the long list functions as a Master List. But what to do with the daily lists? If you draw from the long list and put these items instead at the end of the long list, and then manipulate these items, that can work.

There are plenty of disadvantages to the long list as your only list, and it works well at the beginning and the first week. But it has simplicity on its side.

The advantage of having a notebook for the month is the long list finally ends somewhere. And you start another list.

I have thought that I could keep a catch-all list, and when I take action on it, then transfer it to another list, Unfinished list, or Started list. That would shorten the long list, and create two lists.

Would a weekly notebook work?
I notice in examples of bullet journals that people have a spread of 2 pages for a week, and a week task list of one page. However, in my composition book I have 31 pages for one week, which maybe takes up more space than a bullet journal, but not enough to fill a composition book, but possibly a smaller notebook.
Then one could repeat a weekly cycle easier. So instead of a daily list you work from a list for one week, and then try to work the next week using the previous week as a model.
All kinds of methods are possible to conceptualize, but it comes to down to what method is practical, and you will do.

I am thinking that a one week notebook might work with a small pocket notebook. Each week is a notebook, and you try to finish the previous week or transfer them. However, pocket notebooks are not necessarily cheap. I think, like Aaron is doing, to transfer items to future dates, is good. So if something repeats weekly or monthly, you don't put on the long list but in the future date.

I used Moleskine notebooks for years and liked them. I could use one for almost 3 months, but they are expensive, and I would get bored with one before the 3 months were over. My eyesight is not so good now, and I like the larger print of a composition book, and they are cheap, and I don't mind messing them up, they are light weight, and portable, and the pages are kept together.

I have tried loose leaf paper and binders, or doing it on computer, but it doesn't stick. I think Mark Forster used a spiral notebook for Autofocus, at least that is what he is using on the video demo, and I think physical medium is important, and the long list method lends itself better to a notebook.

I have Google searched "pocket bullet journals", and many use pocket notebooks for that purpose. The small notebooks of 48 pages or so tend to be used for one a month, with one page for each day of the month, and the pocket notebooks that have many pages perhaps for a quarter of a year. However, the print is too tiny for me to use, but several concepts can be used in a larger notebook. I think there is a value to having the long list stop at a month, it motivates to clean it up and weed, and start a new book for another month. Otherwise, the long list seems to go on forever.
One person has a monthly pocket book, but also has another year pocket book, where he puts anything that will last longer than a month. This is maybe a good idea, and can be used for longer term projects.

I don't think there is practical use for a weekly Autofocus notebook, but I trying to see if there is some way to get a weekly review cycle in with a long list, perhaps somehow processing by each week's list.

Mark H:

DDD is usually some variety of Delegate - Defer - Delete. It usually represents one of the ways in which you manage items on your list that you aren't going to do right now. it is a conceptual framework for weeding lists, IOW.

I've been thinking about this a little more, and I think the danger of daily and weekly lists, as Mark F found out years ago, is that you try to fit the work to the time block, and that is essentially a futile effort in estimation. People try to allocate the work to finish it and then they run afoul of the issues that come with that.

The thing I wanted to point out from BuJo is that the review process of carrying tasks forward into a new list is a way of guaranteeing that you'll do some weeding. The danger is when you start trying to estimate how much you can get done at any given time, and then feeling bad or procrastinating because your estimates trigger psychological resistance of one form or another.

However, you can carry forward tasks without the psychological overhead if you simply aren't committed to getting it all done "right now" or even within the time frame of your specific carry-forward cadence. For example, I would argue that the point of carrying tasks forward month to month isn't to try to figure out what you can get done in a month, but rather, to make sure that you are evaluating the state of all of your work at least once a month. Sure, you will look at some things and think, no, I don't want to keep looking at this task right now, I'll defer it to some point into the future, but that's not the same as estimating what you think you can get done in the month.

I think this is a subtle but critical distinction.

Mark F. and others have all come to identify at one point or another the value of limiting work in progress as a way of concentrating your work. MF's work on no-lists is a tour de force in this respect. All of the no-list items, I believe, helped to achieve strong focused effort and concentration, which is what made them so effective, and they did this because they were forcing you to restrict the number of things you were actively thinking about at any given time. 5/2 is a great example of this. You simply can't add more to the list than the active working set.

Moreover, there is no psychological expectation that everything on the list gets done right now. You just work on things with concentration and let that work itself out.

This is what distinguishes a daily list from a no-list, among other things. The problem with weekly, daily, or monthly lists in the way that most people do them is that they try to finish everything on those lists. The moment you start trying to get a certain volume of work done rather than trying to focus on the most important things to do right now you get into what programmers would call "feature factories" and you either don't get the right work done, or you churn out poor work just to make your quotas. People like Edward Deming and Peter Drucker realized this very early on.

The Ivy Lee Method is also different in this respect. It's a daily list, but the whole point is that you aren't actually trying to get all 6 items on your list done. There's no incentive one way or another regarding finishing the list. The instructions explicitly state that if you don't get the things done, that's fine, just carry them over to the next day. Thus, the point of an Ivy Lee list isn't to finish the list in a day, but rather to concentrate your effort on one thing at a time, in order, and limit your WIP as well as your decision fatigue within a given day.

What I'm coming to stabilize around is that a time management/productivity system is meant to address three things:

1. Making sure that you are where you need to be at specific times (scheduling)
2. Relieving the brain of the effort of keeping track of all of your commitments, tasks, and intentions.
3. Concentrating your focus onto a specific task in the moment; that is, preventing things like the future and the past from impeding on your ability to work in the present.

The first item is almost universally well addressed by having some sort of calendar. The more that calendar represents only hard commitments and time-specific entities that are inherently time-specific, the better it is able to give you information about your time.

The second item it exceptionally well handled simply by having lists of things. The organization of those lists seems to be very fluid, and it seems the only guiding principle for this would be to try to ensure that things you need to see are seen with sufficient frequency to matter, but not so frequently so as to distract or fatigue you. Thus, I could see someone with lots of little one off obligations across a range of projects being well served by putting them all into a single large list to tackle. While someone else might find it better to organize their tasks by roles/responsibilities or areas of focus. Almost everyone, I think, will benefit from being able to separate tasks that are waiting to become active (future tasks) and tasks that you consider actively ready to be done right now or at any viable moment. Mark's systems have all explicitly been designed around managing the active task list, with the assumption that any future tasks will be put in some sort of tickler system to become active when they should at some point in the future. The easiest tickler system out there is simply a separate list with items that you review at some sufficiently regular cadence for items that need to be "activated".

Such lists will readily benefit from being weeded at some regular interval, such as weekly (GTD), monthly (BuJo) or at intuitive points (MF Long Lists). The emphasis here being that the regular review is *not* about trying to schedule tasks to fit within the "review cycle".

Finally, you need some way to put all of the ideas and the like out of your head and concentrate on taking action on a single thing right in this moment. Ideally, you need to be able to give yourself the space to focus for longer periods of time when you're doing deep work, and focus intensely when working on short work to get it done efficiently. IMO, this is where working off of the long list directly is less effective, because you tend to be more diffuse when doing that. On the other hand, working off of a no-list or some other WIP limited queue of items can be really powerful, and that's where I see things like no-list or Ivy Lee coming into their own, especially if you can plan just far enough ahead to let your brain stew on the items, such as the day before.

Aaron,

Thanks. I think I understand your post, and will read again more thoroughly later.

For a while I was mainly writing short list or no lists and if you write enough of them you don't have time to check a long list anymore. I have had trouble integrating the short list with the long list. Mark Forster recommended putting it at the end of the long list and that is what I've been doing lately. one can select several items from the long list and put them at the end and then process them like a shortlist. I've now started a new notebook for December and still working out of the notebook for November. I hope to weed out November's list but still it is a big chore. It would be better to weed them out regularly and then finally at the end of the month.
A new year is coming up and I am wondering if there's a way to defer items to a yearly calendar. Perhaps one without any year and just refer to a month. And keep up the use from year after year.
There are many items that I will have to do it some time especially end of life projects but I might not get to them within a month but I still need to be reminded of them and do some long-range planning. Or there might be projects that I need to do once a year only and I could keep the year book to remind me to do it the following year at the same time.

Aaron,

Thanks for all your posts. I find them inspiring. While this site is in limbo lately, you are certainly carrying the torch : but hopefully it gets back to normal soon!

Are you publishing anything anywhere else on the internet? You should write a book, as your thinking is actually at the forefront of the philosophy of productivity (and its arch enemy procrastination and distraction).

BTW this article is evergreen: [How to Beat Procrastination — Wait But Why](https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/how-to-beat-procrastination.html)

There are so many gems and trailblazing work by Mark here, that the debt of gratitude can never be repaid. The value is immeasurable. I hope it gets to shine its guiding light into the future.

Aaron
I read your post again and I pretty much understand it. I've been reading your other posts so I know what you're referring to. I think it's best to achieve a balance but I find it hard to do that. For deep focus I like to go somewhere else then home or work like the library or coffee shop or hotel room - somewhere where it is different surroundings. For deep focus I will just apart from scanning the long list and when I get to an item that I feel like concentrating on I will do that and just take as much time as needed. So the list acts as a scaffold. Cal Newport says that he has a thinking chair where he just thinks and he will take long walks and schedule a whole day for an activity. It seems that deep focus is necessary when you have several items that you need to hold in short-term memory and be able to combine them and integrate them. in that case scanning a long list and only spending a short time on each one does not lend itself to doing that. Should the deep focus sessions be scheduled or not or just be done on the spur of the moment?

I found that working on a short list for a session of let's say 90 minutes and writing down each thing that you think about to be very useful. However I still have trouble integrating that with a long list and I almost think it has to be done separately - maybe using a separate piece of paper or separate notebook. It's very likely that Mark Forster has something that would help with this. I haven't read everything he's written but I think that the questions method if I knew more about it would be more along the line of this - doing creative thinking.

Working a long list and doing deep focus uses a different parts of the brain so perhaps separating them on paper would be better. I used to integrate them and keep my notes and deep thinking and the long list in the same notebook but then I would lose track of my deep thinking notes and they really would not be useful because I could not find them again. Anyone have any suggestions?

Mark H:

For deep work, Mark Forster's general recommendations have been pretty consistent throughout his books and his work on long lists, which is generally that some work that requires deep, intense concentration over a period of time, such as writing a book, is often done best by scheduling specific time each day to work on it, and then spending that time working on it. Others have successfully used long list methods to incrementally work on things like writing books. The rule to "work as long as you like on a task" can be used effectively to do deep work without fear provided that you are confident in your ability to spend significant enough amounts of time on that work without being distracted, and also not getting lost in that work.

You can also see the "Current Initiative" concept that Mark has included in some of his books, as well as the idea of sufficient, regular, focused attention that he talks about in SoPP.

I think most people tend to converge on their recommendations for deep work, with almost everyone doing something like time blocking. Those that don't tend to advocate some sort of "Eat the Frog" methodology. Both of these could be thought of categorically as more or less the same idea, implemented somewhat differently, which is to isolate and protect some specific time towards the deep work.

For some people, the benefit of the time blocking method over something like Eat the Frog is that you can pick a time throughout the day that works for you. You can find this concept in the Time Management section of Peter Drucker's "The Effective Executive" as well as in the works by Cal Newport, Brendon Burchard, and many others. The danger here, of course, is that if you can't follow such a schedule, and you can't commit to actually letting yourself do nothing else but that work during that scheduled block, then you are in real danger of not getting any work done in the day.

On the other hand, an Eat the Frog method has the advantage that you anchor the deep work into an ordering, so that you don't let yourself get to anything else until you've done something sufficiently satisfying to you on your deep work first. Many writers have worked this way, such as Hemingway and Donand Knuth. Hemingway, I think, said that he worked first thing in the morning and then when he was done, he'd go and let himself do everything else. Don Knuth has said that he tends to try to find the most difficult and ugly thing first and then work on that so that everything else is more pleasant as the day goes on. I think Stephen King has said that he works a bit like this to a specific word count.

The problem with Eat the Frog is making sure that you chunk your work into something that can be realistically accomplished in a day. Writers tend to do that through word counts or hours working (which amounts of a type of time blocking). Others will work to break down their tasks until there is an almost certainty that they can get that one task done in a day.

Both of them effectively serve as some way to allow you to spend sufficient, regular attention on a given thing. I find that something like Eat the Frog works better for me because I am very bad at working to a schedule based on blocks of time, but I'm much better at working towards the completion of specific tasks.

Either method is compatible with long lists. And even people who *love* their lists, such as David Allen, in talking about GTD, will talk about the importance of time blocking to create space for certain kinds of deep work. You might still have a list contextualized around that deep work time, but the real secret to making it all work is the idea of scheduling it somehow.

Long list methods like FV are a form of ordered selection for working on things, and if you combine that with a task like, "Work for 90minutes on Book", then maybe that's a way of combining a long list with a time block, even though that may or may not be the right way to go about it. The danger with something like that is that the commitment to 90minutes might increase resistance, while just doing a little bit of it might not.

For me, because my deep work is almost always the most important and immediate thing that I need to do, and also because it is the most important, it ends up being most likely to cause resistance. This generally means that I can't strictly rely on a long list and standing out to really get me working on the task often enough for my liking. I'm simply too immature in my mental conscientiousness for that. Instead, it's much easier for me to make a commitment the day before that I'm not going to do anything else before I get X done. That doesn't always work, but it's more likely to work for me than other things.

I find that the most effective strategy for getting to work on deep work is probably something like the 90 Heroic Minutes protocol:

1. Pick the important thing you want to work on and write up why it matters to you and what you want to achieve.
2. Completely clear the environment of any and all potential distractions, digital and physical.
3. Set a timer for 90 minutes.
4. Do anything you want, as long as it is either nothing at all or your most important task.

That distraction-free freedom to do nothing is the big game changer for me. It's like a meditative period of bringing your whole person into the work, and then you find that the work just starts getting done. But that only works if your mind can't jump ship to something else.

Aaron

Maybe if you re-post on a new thread it will get more replies.

Aaron,
You had good suggestions that aren't represented by the thread topic, and might be missed otherwise.