Mark Forster is the author of three books about time management and personal organisation. The most recent, Do It Tomorrow, was published by Hodder in 2006.
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 19:34 For those of you who are having trouble understanding Beeminder, here’s Bethany to explain it all. It’s worth also reading the written explanation given on Youtube.
Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 19:05 The more I use Beeminder the more I like it - though of course it’s early days yet.
So how am I getting on with the two goals I set myself originally now that I have five days worth of data?
First the walking goal is going very nicely. I am slightly on the wrong side of the “yellow brick road”, but this will solve itself the next time I do a long walk. Having the goal has certainly encouraged me to keep walking and has also encouraged me to do a good length every day. I took a day off yesterday. Days off are necessary but sometimes it’s difficult to get going again the next day. Because I needed a good result for Beeminder, I didn’t have any trouble at all.
The actual data points are the unjoined dots, while all the other lines and lanes are various types of average. As long as I stay in the broad yellow path I’m all right.
The weight goal is even better. I have lost 3.5 lbs already! Actually quick loss of this type is not uncommon when one starts a weight loss program. The real battle comes further down the line when the initial rate of gain slows down.
Because this type of goal gives a week’s level start to get acclimatized I am well ahead of the game.
It remains to be seen whether the slice of delicious chocolate cake I had in Dorking to reward myself after my walk this afternoon will effect my weight tomorrow morning.
Mark Forster
For those who have a burning desire to follow my progress more closely than the occasional updates I will be posting, I’ve made the two goals publicly accessible.
You can follow them on:
Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 23:08 I succeeded in doing all 17 tasks that I set myself yesterday, though it took me longer than I expected and it was late and I was tired by the time I finished. Instead of learning the lesson, I went mad today and set myself 38 points - and of course failed ignominiously. So 17 points yesterday and 0 today.
The moral of this is that the game should be used only for those things which you want to give priority to getting done - certainly the total shouldn’t be in double figures. You can and will of course do many things which aren’t on the list.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 11:05 I must admit to being quite excited about Beeminder. As I wrote a couple of days ago, I have started two Beeminder goals, one for weight loss and the other for longest distance walked. Two days in, both goals are going well. I’ve lost two pounds and did a 9 mile walk yesterday.
Starting off well is easy enough though - what is more difficult is keeping going. I think Beeminder will be excellent for that, but I’ve not yet proved it for myself. But looking at some of the graphs of progress made by subscribers and the Beeminder staff themselves, I can only describe them as amazing.
However as a time management “guru”, I naturally started thinking about how to make a complete time management system out of Beeminder. It would be too cumbersome to make a separate Beeminder goal for everything I’m working on at the moment. And even if I did, I’d probably spend more time entering the data and looking at the pretty graphs than I did doing the work.
I noticed a couple of attempts in this direction on the Beeminder site (and there may be more which I’ve missed). Team members plot the number of hours work they do working on developing Beeminder. That’s good, but hours worked doesn’t necessarily equate to productivity - though in their case I’m sure it does. They also track the number of improvements made to Beeminder (goal: one per day). And I noticed a mention of tracking how many “important jobs” were done each day.
These are still very focused on a few particular goals, and not on success at living all the many aspects of our lives. That’s not intended as a criticism. Focusing on one or two things and letting everything else find its own place is very effective. But I’d still like something more comprehensive.
And then it struck me that I already had the ideal answer in a time management game I’d written years before.
It’s extremely simple:
This is ideal for being tracked in Beeminder, and I think the way that Beeminder presents the results will turn this from an interesting exercise into a powerful means of keeping yourself on track. It forces you to consider what your priorities are for the day and also - perhaps even more importantly - forces you to consider what realistically you can get done. And as a bonus it forces you to control interruptions and “emergencies” so they don’t prevent you from achieving your goal for the day.
I’ve started up another Beeminder goal to track this. Today I’m going for 17 points (this blog post is one of them). The consequences of failure are unthinkable.
Monday, January 30, 2012 at 12:55 I made the paradoxical point in my last few articles that urgency is superior to importance as a method for prioritizing, but that the urgency we give to a task is dependent on the importance that task has for us.
I also make the point that this is not a direct relationship. Something is not more urgent simply because it’s more important. Urgency is importance translated into a time scale that is appropriate for the task.
We’ve looked at how to allocate tasks their place on the urgent/not-urgent scale. Now it’s time to look at what importance is and how we can tell how important a particular task or project is.
The first point to make is the obvious one that what is important to one person may not be at all important to someone else and vice versa. There may of course be considerable overlap between people, particularly in matters of politics, environment and religion, but basically each person has their own individual set of interests, preferences and matters of concern.
So we are not trying to discover some abstract quality of “importance” that belongs inalienably to a task or project. What we are trying to discover is how important it is to us.
Faced with a question like “Which is more important, buying a new car or extending the house?”, how do we decide?
We can try all sorts of ways of quantifying this, but I would suggest that the simplest way is in terms of timescale, i.e.
“How long are we prepared to put up with the old car?”
“How long are we prepared to put up with the house the way it is?”
That will give you the answer of which to do first. And if the answer to either question is “Indefinitely”, then you can simply cross that project off your list.
This can be applied to all sorts of situations:
“How long do I want to stay in this job?”
“Should I call Aunt May sooner or later?
“When do I aim to get my next promotion?”
“When is the right time to start this report?”
“How much longer am I going to wait until I can play the guitar reasonably well?”
“How much longer am I going to put up with this not working properly?”
“When am I going to stop having a backlog of email?”
If the answer to any of these questions is “indefinitely”, “never” or “I don’t know yet”, then you can remove the project from your list for now.
Once you’ve made a commitment to a project it ceases to be a matter of importance because a commitment implies that you have committed yourself to doing the work involved. It then becomes a matter of relative urgency appropriate to the work. For example learning to play the guitar requires a daily effort. That tells you how urgent each practice session is. Calling Aunt May on the other hand is a single task (or possibly a weekly or monthly one) and that is a different degree of urgency. Both the guitar and calling Aunt May may only be appropriate at certain times of day, so they have a higher degree of urgency during those time and none at all at others.
It may seem odd to you that both the degree of importance and the degree of urgency should be expressed in terms of time for prioritizing purposes. But that is what prioritizing is all about: the order in which tasks are done.
Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 17:38 I’ve just started with Beeminder.com, which is a great website for giving yourself the maximum motivation to achieve a goal, whether it’s weight loss, exercise, blogging, book writing or reading, or anything else you can think of.
What I particularly like about it is that it gives you some very sophisticated ways of keeping on track, including some very nice coloured charts with lots of different bits of information.
I’ve started two challenges for myself today. The first is to work myself up to being able to walk 24 miles in a day (I could do 16 before Christmas but have regressed since then).
Here’s the graph that goes with that:
Basically I have to keep myself within the yellow brick road, but there’s a lot more to it than that.
The second challenge is to lose some weight, and here is the image for that (I’ve removed the incriminating evidence for this one!)
Note that in this sort of goal you get a period of grace at the beginning in which you aim to keep your weight flat.
I’ll post these images again in a few days time, so you can see how I’m getting on and how Beeminder deals with my results.
Saturday, January 28, 2012 at 9:13 In my last two posts I introduced the concept that urgency is superior to importance as a method of prioritizing. I then pointed out that although many tasks are obviously urgent or come with an external deadline, there are a whole raft of tasks which come without a built-in degree of urgency. We have to provide that ourselves.
So how do we decide what urgency to give a task?
By its importance to us of course.
But note that this importance isn’t a direct relationship. We have to give it the degree of urgency that is appropriate to the task. We can’t just say “Task X is more important than Task Y: therefore I’ll do Task X first”. That is where prioritizing by importance falls down. No doubt saving the world is more important than eating breakfast, but it still makes sense to eat breakfast before we set out on our work for saving the world.
You’ll see from the above example that urgency is very sensitive to time. Particularly when we are dealing with minor but necessary tasks there are times of day when they are urgent and times of day when they are not. Eating breakfast is not urgent in the evening, but can be very urgent in the morning.
Let’s have a look at the processes involved in prioritizing by importance and contrast them with prioritizing by urgency:
Prioritizing by importance
Make commitment to a task or project
Decide on its importance
Do it as soon as more important tasks have been done
Prioritizing by urgency
Make commitment to a task or project
Decide on its importance
Allocate urgency appropriate to the type of project/task in accordance with its importance
Do it as soon as more urgent tasks have been done
Next article: How do we tell how important a task is?
Friday, January 27, 2012 at 22:49 It’s easy to tell how urgent a task is if we have the boss or a client on our back threatening dire things if it’s not completed by the deadline. But the majority of the tasks we do during the day are not like that. They don’t have precise deadlines and they are generally unsupervised by anyone except ourselves.
How urgent is it to check my email?
How urgent is it to write the next article on my blog?
How urgent is my daily exercise?
How urgent is it to repaint the dining room?
How urgent is it to call my aunt?
How urgent is it to start preparing for Christmas? (my wife has started already!)
How urgent is it to tidy my desk?
How urgent is it to start writing a book if the deadline is six months away?
How urgent is it to write the briefing papers for next month’s meeting?
If you start trying to prioritize by urgency you will find that you are faced with this kind of question over and over again. It’s here that one is tempted to fall back into prioritizing by importance: writing the book is more important than tidying my desk therefore I will write the book in preference to tidying my desk. The problem with that approach is that writing the book is going to continue to be more important than tidying my desk for the next six months, so I may end up with a very untidy desk.
The answer to the question “How do we tell how urgent a task is?” is that in the majority of cases we can’t. Some tasks have obvious negative consequences if we delay them like missing a bus or missing the next issue of the newspaper, but for most there is no “correct” degree of urgency.
The fact is that we have to allocate the urgency ourselves. So how urgent is checking our email? The answer to that will depend on whether we have a policy of checking our email once a day or three times a day or every time a new email arrives. That’s up to us. How urgent is repainting our dining room? That depends on how long we are prepared to put up with the existing decor. Again that’s up to us. How urgent is our daily exercise? That depends on whether we have a set time during the day or not. And - you guessed it - that’s up to us!
Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 17:48 Ever since Charles Hummel wrote his classic 1967 essay The Tyranny of the Urgent, urgency has had a bad press in the time management world. Received time management wisdom has long been that prioritizing should be by importance, with urgency as a side-show at best. We’re all by now familiar with Stephen Covey’s Four Quadrants, which gives Important two of the “good” quadrants while Urgent is only allowed one “good” quadrant and then only because it shares it with Important.
The questions I have are “Does Prioritizing by Urgency deserve its bad reputation?” and its corollary “Is Prioritizing by Importance all that it’s cracked up to be?”
If you construct a To-Do list in which all the tasks relate to your commitments (and every to-do list should be constructed on that basis), then everything on that list ultimately has to be done. You have, in other words, to have the intention to meet the specifications that go with each of your commitments. If you don’t have that intention, it’s not a commitment. And if it’s not a commitment it shouldn’t be on your to-do list.
Having accepted that everything on your to-do list has to be done, then the easiest and most direct way of getting through the list would be a simple First In First Out method. You do the list in the order in which tasks get written on the list. Importance makes no difference to the order, because if everything has to be done everything is equally important.
Of course we all know that this FIFO method wouldn’t work, and the reason it wouldn’t work is because tasks have different degrees of urgency. Urgency is what makes it necessary for us to do one particular task before another regardless of where it’s written on the list.
Urgency is in fact the natural way to prioritize. We do things first because they need to be done first. The farmer sows the seed and later the crop appears. At one time sowing becomes urgent and at another reaping. There is no possible way of saying that sowing is more important than reaping or vice versa.
Why then does prioritizing by urgency have such a bad press? I think there are two reasons:
The first is that people tend to think of the degree of urgency a task has in terms of when the task needs to be finished, when in fact the urgency relates to when the task needs to be started. This misconception is one reason why Prioritizing by Urgency is so often equated with deadline-chasing.
The second is that in the complications of modern life people very rarely do actually prioritize by urgency. They only start to prioritize by urgency when their other methods, or lack of them, have failed. The result is the same as in the first reason: deadline-chasing.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 9:22 Just a reminder that everything on this site is free with the exception of my books (and one of those is a free download). That gives you access to one of the most powerful time management systems, hundreds of articles, a forum to ask questions and discuss your time management problems or ideas, and frequent new articles and updates.
There are no ads on the site, apart from the books. OK, there may be one or two lurking in dark corners which I haven’t spotted. These are from the days when there were ads on the site. Whenever I come across one I remove it. They produce virtually no income in any case.
The site does cost money to maintain and a vast amount of time too. So if you want to show your appreciation, don’t forget the donation box in the margin. I’m very grateful to those who have donated in the past, but I haven’t had even one donation for months now!
Anything you feel like giving will be greatly appreciated. And to make it easy, you don’t even have to go to the margin - here’s the box!
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 15:34 This is just to remind you that the number of registrations for the Forum is limited to 250 and that number is currently filled.
This means that every time I get a request for a new registration I delete the existing account which has been unused for the longest time. The current longest one has been unused for 1 year 73 days.
So if you haven’t used your account for a while and want to make sure it doesn’t lapse, all you have to do is log-in to the account. You don’t have to make a post.
If the number of requests for accounts rises considerably so that the unused period before deletion gets unacceptably small, I shall have to shell out some extra cash and upgrade my account with Squarespace. Mind you, that would also allow on-site registration so that would be some compensation!
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 1:28 When I was preparing the Articles tab, I went back and looked through all the past articles in order to make sure they were tagged as Articles. In the process I came across quite a few old articles which I think I think are worth reviving. Some of them I’d even forgotten that I’d written!
Here’s a short selection of the ones I like best:
Monday, January 23, 2012 at 21:25 I have added a Korean translation to the SuperFocus instructions. Many thanks to Seokhwan Kim for translating them.
Monday, January 23, 2012 at 19:44 I gave one suggested exercise in my post yesterday about Exercising the Choice Muscle, and there are several more suggestions from readers in the Comments.
Here’s one exercise which I don’t think anyone else has come up with yet, though it’s very simple and straightforward.
Write a list of five random tasks
Do them in the order in which they are written down
Then write another list, adding one more task, i.e. six
Repeat regularly adding one more to the total tasks on the list each time
You may not do any other tasks while doing this exercise. If you fail to complete the tasks or do them in the wrong order, then next time reduce the number of tasks until you do succeed in doing them.
Sunday, January 22, 2012 at 13:51 In my recent article Taking the Easy Choice I suggested that the ability to make difficult choices was something that could be improved by training.
So I’d like to hear suggestions for exercises that would strengthen our ability to do this.
There’s one in my book Get Everything Done. You nominate one task you are going to do the next day. It can be something you need to do anyway, or it can be something completely arbitrary. Start with something easy. If you succeed in doing it, then you choose something a little bit more difficult for the following day. And so on day by day, getting a little bit harder each time. Whenever you fail to do the day’s task (no excuses are accepted), you have to reduce the difficulty of the task for the next day. The idea is that you build yourself up to the point where you can rely on yourself to do even the most difficult tasks when you say you are going to do them.
Can anyone think up some more exercises which would be as effective or even more effective? Answers in the Comments.
Saturday, January 21, 2012 at 13:15 I have added a new menu item for Articles. This accesses the blog category Articles, which shows the contents of the blog with all the minor posts removed, such as administrative messages, news items and passing thoughts or queries.
So by using this tab you can quickly get to the important stuff on the website. Try it and see.
Friday, January 20, 2012 at 14:56 You have to make a very difficult call to an unsatisfied customer. Do you:
a) make the call?
b) tidy your desk?
c) play a game on your iPhone/computer?
If your normal response to a situation like this is a) then you don’t need to read this post, except perhaps to wonder what on earth the problem is supposed to be.
If you normally go for b) then you usually take the easy choice, and it would be a good idea to learn to strengthen your choice muscle.
If c) would be your reaction, then you are not just taking the easy choice - you are withdrawing from the game altogether. You badly need to make stronger choices.
One of the most common characteristics of bad time managers is that they have a definite tendency to take the easy choice.
Taking the easy choice results in things like:
This is something that can improve with training. And it’s well-worth doing. Strengthening one’s ability to take the more difficult choice will make a lot of difference in life.
Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 13:50 There’s an interesting article in Business Insider called Guess What? You’re Wasting Your Time If You Organize by Michael Scrage of the Harvard Business Review.
Do you agree with him?
Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 19:31 I’ve now added Books as a tab in the main menu. Do have a look at it. You can buy my books Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play and Do It Tomorrow there, plus my recommendations for other books on the subject of “time management and personal organization”. I have interpreted that quite loosely, so you will find books like The E-Myth Revisited and What Color Is Your Parachute there. Basically most of them are the books that I have found most helpful in my life and work, plus a few highly recommended by colleagues and clients (or even written by them). There are also links provided by Amazon to similar books which are well worth exploring.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 17:57 If you’ve been to this website before, you will have noticed that there has been a major redesign of the website today.
My aim has been to reduce the clutter on the pages and to make it easier to read the text without distractions. This is important as this is very much a text-based website. As part of this re-design I’ve removed the left-hand margin and combined the contents with the right-hand margin. In the process I’ve got rid of some of the margin items.
At the same time I have made the blog the Home page since it is the main vehicle for new writing. I’ve renamed the old static Home page as “About”, and I intend to do a major re-write of that page in the near future.
I also intend to make “Books” a main menu item.
Be prepared for more changes after I’ve lived with the new design for a while.
