Get Everything Done

As someone else pointed out once, a lot of it probably comes down to emotions. At some point, all of the stuff that works is the stuff that somehow manages to address the emotional state of your mind, or possibly the psychological states of your mind. Whether it is the mental and emotional work that Paul Looman's Time Surfing teaches, or the deliberate carving out of time for deep work a la Cal Newport (who, for a time blocker, is an awfully flexible one compared to the rest of the time blocking ilk), it's always described by these people in terms of the impact on one's overall mental space.

I really like Oliver Burkeman's article here:

https://www.oliverburkeman.com/fourhours

I think this is something of a nucleus as Burkeman points out, and it's an star around which almost all of the methods orbit. In short, if you can manage to carve out something close to 3 or 4 hours of dedicated time for something of high impact/value to your life, you'll probably do just fine, and probably well above typical.

If you look at Cal Newport, all his time blocking is about carving out that time. Everything else is just a way to manage everything else to get that space that he wants. He even says not to time block every hour of your non working day.

If you pay close attention to David Allen, you'll notice that the whole system is meant to create sufficient mental clarity and space to allow you to safely spend time doing what you really need/want to do, without worrying about everything else. And he even advocates a form of time blocking when you have deep work to do, specifically in the form of scheduling out as a hard appointment some time for yourself to let yourself do that "big ticket item."

If you ever follow Brendan Burchard, he's a huge time blocker, but his core principle of productivity from his HP6 is the idea of carving out sufficient time (4 - 6 hours, or more precisely, about 60% of your time) to work on PQO (prolific quality output). He doesn't really care about the rest of the time in terms of productivity. He notes that most high performers manage to have this focus, no matter how they achieve it.

If you look at Time Surfing, similar to David Allen, it's about creating that mental space and clarity that you need to be in the moment with whatever you're working on. It's a way of encouraging and helping you to create the best focus on you can on a single thing at a time and respond accordingly, which includes crafting your environment to avoid interruptions when you need to have maximum focus.

All of these models, and I would include Mark Forster's in those, tend to anchor around this concept of how you create space for high value/high impact activity, and then actually *do* that activity in the space you have made. Getting there can be a challenge, and some people aren't able to intuit the application of one technique or another, and sometimes they just aren't appealing to one personality or another, but I think they're all after much the same thing.

I feel like now, I could effectively use many of the methods mentioned above. However, some of them I enjoy more than others, and they represent more engagement from me on a purely personal level, regardless of effectiveness, which is a point that Mark has made in the past. So, for me, since I now feel like I've "got it" in some sense, I can switch from making a choice based on trying to find the "best" system, to trying to find a system that I simply like using the most.

avrum:

<<I’m paraphrasing, but it’s the gist of his personal life system.>>

https://youtu.be/QvqwnltVG9o?si=Ma4Pl8fh22e8QW5Z&t=2060
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0sNSZDNMCk

I think one of the biggest issues for Newport is that sometimes he doesn't do a good job of establishing context of much of what he says. When he says, "Time Block relaxation," for instance, he doesn't mean time blocking recreational time outside of work per se (though I don't think he would object to it).

It is true in a sense that he advocates for "time blocking non-time blocking time," but that's really just saying to have a defined contour and schedule of your work in which you turn off at the end of it so that the rest of your life can be lived without the work coming into it.

He's very much about controlling your time, it's true. But I don't think it's really fair to suggest that he's all about hyper scheduling. I find the approach of control to be less desirable after having internalized a lot of Time Surfing, but in the end they both share the common thread of trying to find intention in what you are doing.

<<If you have children - in particular children younger than 12 - and work, this is an ideal that very few can reach. Throw in self-care - exercise, proper diet (which involves cooking hearty meals), children’s homework, afterschool programs, etc etc… it’s not an achievable goal for most dual income famlies.>>

I don't think Burkeman's point was to say that you must schedule 3 hours a day for deep work or your life is over! Instead, to someone like Burkeman, the idea that you really only have 3 hours or so (maybe up to 6 for some people) of truly intense intellectual capacity per day is freeing because it means that you *don't* have to try to control your whole day, and life isn't all about hyper focus all day long. So, the number is more about something relatively low by productivity geek standards, rather than high. It's a much more attainable and sane number.

Now, I think it's also true that for many people, it might be hard to find 3 hours at a stretch for anything. But I do think that many people are much more capable than they think of finding the equivalent of 3 to 4 hours in aggregate over a whole day of time to work. I also think it's absolutely true that it would be better if those were at longer stretches than shorter stretches.

This is something that the Effective Executive spoke about years before any of the rest of this stuff showed up. The idea of trying to manage your time at that point was simply about trying to shepherd your work life in some way that would permit you the time to actually think on the things that would produce real value in your career and workplace as a knowledge worker. And even then it acknowledged the difficulty in finding long stretches of time in which to do that sort of thinking. On the other hand, it also acknowledged how we should still try to make that time as long as possible, because there are real benefits to doing so. Maybe that means you can only stretch it to 30 minutes at a time, but even then, that's much better than 5 minutes at a time.

Now, I'll also admit that I happen to think that the dual income family is a fundamentally broken model, however necessary it might be for many people. It's absolutely true that it's hard to both work a "full time" job (whatever that may entail for the family in particular) and also manage and work with young children. It's not ideal by any stretch of the imagination, and it puts an insane stress on many families in my observation. A part of me strongly believes that the answer to such things is maybe letting go of the idea of the need for such intense work productivity at all. In some sense, maybe it's just not that important when you have young children at home that need you. Maybe you can't do that, but a lot of people I know could do well to stop trying to hold themselves to some sort of standard of life that expects them to be both homemakers and career professionals at equal levels. I think some people almost have to forgive themselves for not being productive under those conditions, even though there isn't anything to forgive.

I actually think a lot of the positive influence of the best productivity systems is in the ability to feel okay with yourself when you say no to things. Whether it's the very intuitive systems or the very control oriented systems, when they are working well, they give the user the ability to freely and contentedly say no to things that really aren't going to matter in the long run.

<<I’ve been listening to a lot of Allen over the holiday and I don’t hear that in his message. There are times where it seems he reluctantly supports putting non-hard landscape items on a calendar. But generally, he’s an old hippy with respect to discretionary time. Personally, that’s the part of his shtick that I enjoy the most. Same with Mark’s Dreams and intuition ideas.>>

I think you're mostly right. But...he's also acknowledged that he takes forever to produce things, like books. Here's a good article that tries to connect the dots:

https://scheduleu.org/why-david-allen-seems-to-be-changing-his-mind-about-scheduling/

The only thing I would say is that I don't think David Allen actually has changed his mind *that* much in this regard. He rightly points out the expense of working with time blocks, and so he emphasizes, just as Cal Newport does, the importance of being ready to tear up and toss your original time block plan if necessary. And he also emphasizes just time blocking when you need to do so, to create sacred time, which is, IMO, consistent with the "sacred time" concept in his GTD book.

I do think that one of the things that makes David Allen one of the OGs of the "Agile" methods of productivity (in that they embrace change) is his early emphasis on not trying to schedule tasks and objectives. Newport is most certainly someone who advocates for the scheduling out of ideas, including weekly and monthly schedules. David Allen definitely is in the other camp.

But I just don't think that many of these people are as far apart as some people would like to put them. Cal Newport was been explicitly, with credit, influenced by David Allen in no small degree. Much of his system is essentially GTD. I'd even go so far as to say that under David Allen's "canonical GTD" comments, you could almost call what Newport does GTD.

And there's an interesting distinction here that can be drawn up between the Intuitive folks. Mark Forster's long lists and David Allen's GTD both take advantage of the freeing effect on the mind of externalizing commitments down to the "actionable" level (though that definition is more broad for Mark). On the other hand, Time Surfing is somewhat anti-intuitive in that it *doesn't* try to "get things out of your head" by writing things down. It's taking advantage of the same Zeigarnik effect as the others, but doing so by actually encouraging you to do more initial mental processing, and even encouraging multiple repeated engagements at the mental level with tasks. Mark's scanning methods will do some of this stuff, but not in the same explicit way, and GTD very much encourages you to *not* do that kind of work if you don't have to with any given task.