Get Everything Done

It's probably an old idea and I wonder whether Mark has written about it: I am experimenting with a Done list. Rather than recording what I hope to do soon and in the future, and will likely fail at to some degree, I log what I have succeeded in doing in recent days.

The format is simple: a grid, with each row labelled for a days, going backwards in time, and the columns dedicated to an activity. The activities I have are

1 advancing the company's sales
2 line management up and down
3 clearing a large backlog of papers and junk
4 making headway on a particular ambition related to family finances
5 anything else.

I write a short phrase in the relevant cell describing what I did to progress that activity on each day that passes. As I got ready to leave the office yesterday, I saw that I had recorded nothing on item 3, so I grabbed a handful of papers from my desk and shredded them; and on item 4, so I signed a client agreement with a financial adviser that had been lurking in the pile.

The grid exposes the absence of progress on activities which, if they have been chosen for inclusion, are presumably among the top four priorities for me currently. It stimulates me to do something, even if it is small, on each theme each day, and as we know, getting started is half the battle. It's encouraging because it shows what you have made demonstrable progress on.

I'll be interested if anyone else has tried this approach.

I am finding that an advantage of the approach is that it only makes sense to log against three or four themes, and to put everything else in a catch-all column called Other. Though some people's situation might be different, for me it would make little sense to force daily progress on more fronts recorded in more columns.

This forces me to limit my efforts to a small number of priorities. I can ease this constraint by defining categories widely, for example, anything that advances the sales of the company. But even after doing that, everything that is not in three or four widely drawn categories has to fight for attention in the "Other" category; and if that starts to have more entries in it than the other columns, I receive a strong visual indication that I am getting spending my time on things others than the fields I have identified as the key areas for focus.

In this way the method achieves naturally what I have found to be the most difficult thing among Mark F's recommendations, which is to use overload as a trigger for auditing one's life commitments, and quite likely shed a few of them. (I expect that appears in Do It Tomorrow.)