Get Everything Done

I've been debating whether to hold off on posting about my latest system experiments until I have more data on them, but I'm too impatient for that, so I'm going to post the current alternatives I'm playing with at the moment.

The problems I've been trying to solve is how to get the best of a few systems:

1. Eat the Frog: This is without a doubt the most effective method I have for actually making long term forward progress, but it is easy to procrastinate on your frog, or get distracted, or to miscalibrate your frog so that it takes too little or too much time in the day, throwing off the balance so that I can easily feel dissatisfied with either a lack of progress or a lack of "free space."

2. Long Lists: These have the combined benefit of maximizing the ease of taking action (nothing seems easier than being able to always go back to a single list to take some action on something rather than having to come up with that from your mind on the fly) as well as offloading mental burdens into an external system. However, it is so easy to lose sight and focus and end up scattered or diffuse across a range of projects.

3. Journaling: Various types of tracking, journaling, and so forth are great for getting ideas flowing and creating a sense of emotional relief around one's work, but it's also very easy to end up doing so much journaling that you don't do any work.

4. Time blocking/boxing: These systems can help ensure balance across a range of activities, but for me, I can never get this balance right. Moreover, it always tends to feel artificial if I have blocks of time in which I am working. They are either too short or too long or something else, and if I try to rework my schedule all the time like Cal Newport's Time Blocking method suggests, I just end up doing too much rewriting all the time, and not enough living in the actual blocks.


A key insight I think I've had is that these systems don't have to all operate at the same level. Instead, I can take some of the principles of all of these and apply them differently. Thus, I've switched things up to try to create a very simple system that applies all of these things in a neat little package. In the past, if I tried to merge multiple systems together into one, I always struggled, because I was trying to apply them all at the same "mental level of abstraction."

What I'm trying to do now is to treat Eat the Frog as the overarching global strategy for my work. That is, in any given area, and overall as a whole, my aim to have a singular focus on one thing that I want to accomplish in that area or for that day. This serves as my "prioritization" layer, which helps to focus my efforts in a single day. It isn't actually mechanical in any way.

The problem with that in my main project (which I have now narrowed down to a single one), is that I have trouble figuring out a single task that I can do. Instead of this, I want something that I can almost always accomplish every single day, to help give myself a sense of accomplishment for the day while still getting adequate time in on my main thing. To do this, I'm trying to embrace a broad time block for this one thing, which has always been problematic for me in the past, but I'm hoping two things will improve its success rate: 1) I'm making it a very large time window, so I can choose to end my block relatively early, or relatively late, depending on how I feel and on how the day goes; 2) I'm using other techniques to actually drive my action within the day, so that hopefully it is easier to get started on my one big frog. Additionally, my time block isn't scheduled for a specific time in the day, only for an order, so that it should be the first thing I do in the day after my morning routine, but that's it. So when I actually get started is flexible.

The time-blocked frog helps to provide an overall structure to the day that isn't too tight. The problem then becomes a question of how I can consistently take action on this frog and other things I need to do in a relatively flexible way that doesn't derail me and also doesn't make it hard to take action. Enter some form of long list.

The idea here is that I still maintain my list or lists of things, and I still broadly take action directly from those lists, but instead of choosing any thing off the list, for any given selection of an item, I have in mind a specific thing I'm working on. So, for instance, I might be doing only things from my morning routine, and then only things that belong in my time-blocked frog, and then only things that are *not* part of my time blocked frog (once my time block is over). This is one of the things that has always caused me trouble with previous attempts at long lists: it was simply too easy to choose the wrong thing off of the list. Now, I'm allowing myself to remove most of the items off the list conceptually for the selection criteria.

However, the problem here with the above is still that this system above still gives you micro-rewards every time you cross something off of the list. Keeping things at a "next action" level helps with this, but to help with the balance, I want to have something that incentivizes me to make progress daily on the routines and habits that I want to do every day (such as doing something with family every day, and working on my frog every day, and so forth).

Enter the Gantt Chart Habit Tracker. By having a place where I can give myself a little "checkmark" for completing a given routine or daily habit in my life, this helps to incentivize these habits as a whole, while still allowing me to keep things on my long list at a finer grained level, thus improving the ease with which I can get started and pick things back up on the long list. I've found that having "big" routine items and "small" items on the same list, at the same level, tends to cause a bit of imbalance in my own work unless those routines are really routine.

I would still consider this early days so far in testing, but there's something that clicks with me in this system, and the benefit is that it has very low to minimal overhead in effect. This approach has all the minimal things that you need, with almost nothing else:

1. Some way to capture all of the stuff on your mind into an external system.
2. Some way to emphasize forward progress on important things (prioritize/schedule).
3. Some way to operationalize work down into actionable chunks.
4. Some way to manage administrative and little things that otherwise might be lost.

My current question in this system is how best to instantiate the long list. I have two options at the moment. I can keep everything in one single long list and work the list using a Forster style algorithm. For this approach, I'm finding the non-preselection systems that let you choose anything on the list at any time to be best, because you will switch "contexts" before a preselection is done, IME. I found Mark's comments about a modified AF2 system to be inspired, as it works really well for this method. The disadvantage of this is that it can be a little tedious and mentally taxing trying to "stay in the pocket" of a given context, as it were, while I'm scanning a list of all the stuff. Not as bad as some things, but it is still more work than just going to a list that is pre-sorted to only have things related to that context/habit that I care about. The other approach is to actually drive my day by my Gantt chart, and selecting a specific habit to do, and then going to my lists and selecting something belonging to that habit/context to do. The benefit of this approach is that you are moving intentionally on the habitual routines you want to establish in a day and going to a sorted/organized list of context-specific items reduces some mental burden of hunting for those things throughout all of your other stuff, but the disadvantage is that it's a little more indirect than a MF long list and so choosing which item you want to do can be more burdensome.

I'm not sure which of these approaches is going to work best. It's clear to me that as an overall approach, getting a large chunk of dedicated time specifically for my "big thing" first thing in the morning is absolutely the best thing for me, so the question then is mostly about how I can arrange for the rest of my day to enable that to happen reliably and consistently. Ideally, having a system that can help me do any kind of thing that also works to help drive me to my "Frog" each morning would be ideal.

I could theoretically just not use a list all the way up until I'm done with my frog, but for some reason I find that I'm resisting that. And after the frog is done, I'd still need a list of things to remind me of all the other stuff I need/could be doing in that day.


Variations of this theme have appeared throughout the history of this forum, but I think the "unique twist" on this theme I'm bringing to the table here (at least for myself) versus some of the themes I've seen in the past, such as Mark's suggestion to schedule writing time, or other's use of a Current Initiative in the day followed by using their long list, is the idea of using the Eat the Frog method as a means of *driving* the use of a long list. Instead of using standing out, I'm using "standing out within an explicit context." Rather than being "off list" when I'm doing my writing time or CI or the list, I'm still working off of items in the list, just only those relating to my frog. This allows me to continue to use my list as a thinking tool to operationalize some tasks, breaking them down in the moment as I'm working on them, and picking them back up the next day trivially easily, without needing to maintain other lists scattered all over the place.

To some people the above may be obvious, but for someone who *really* likes crisp lines and boundaries in their systems, playing with the exact "meta levels" of each thing is important for my own sanity. :-)

We'll see how this continues to work going forward.

Mark:

FVP with a resistance question might very well work, but you could say that I'm resisting it? :-)

Alan:

I actually prefer thinking of Frogs in terms of discrete tasks, but with the most important things that I'm doing, I've found that I am unable to make a task small enough to get it done in a reasonable amount of time, making it impractical for a daily target as a "frog." That's why I'm trying to use the time block, despite liking the idea of discrete tasks more.

After playing around with different approaches to drive my lists as mentioned above, I've come to the present conclusion that a long list beats the rest by a large margin, particularly for the following reasons:

* It's much easier and more fluid to have the list you work from also be the list you add to as a universal capture device
* It's less mental overhead for me to choose items on the basis of a long list + some algorithm vs. choosing some context in which to work and then choosing an item from a sub-list (which is how I needed to drive my work using just a Gantt chart/habit tracker)
* It's still easier to take action when I can select items from a list of low-level next actions rather than high level and nebulous elements or goals.
* It's easier to be more flexible with a variety of different types of actions throughout the day, including spontaneous ones, with a long list than by a habit tracker.

I still find the Habit Tracker/Gantt chart invaluable for logging/journaling about my daily activities, as I don't find it easy to reflect on a long list as well as when I have all of the types of actions charted out visually and spatially, but I don't find it easy to drive action based on it.

And using the overarching scheme of "do the frog first" approach to help anchor my choices in the list seems to also help in the selection process quite a bit.

So, I'm going to continue with this approach and see how I settle in!