Get Everything Done

Today is the eighth day running in which I have successfully done every item on my predictive to do list. It’s still working like a dream. If you haven’t tried it out yet, then you might find it well worth the effort. See the instructions at my posting Predicting Your Day and its follow-up.

The answer is amazingly well.

Today is the fourth day in which I have used this form of to do list, and on the first three days I completed every item on the list with great ease. Today at 3 p.m. I have only a few small items left.

You’ll recall that the to do list is written in answer to the question “What do I actually think that I will do today?” What I realised very quickly was that asking the question changes the reality. In other words, if I write down the answers to the question, then I will have a very different day from what would happen if I just allowed the day to happen.

You might think that asking a question like this would result in very little getting done. But in fact the opposite has been the case. I have got more done than normal - including some very serious pieces of work which I had been putting off.

What’s more, I’ve done all this without looking at the to do list. Once I’ve written the list, I’ve just got on with what’s in my head. Since the list reflects what I expect to do, by and large that’s what I’ve done - virtually automatically. I’ve found it useful to check the list at lunchtime, just to remind myself what’s left, and also towards the end of the working day.

I’m also becoming aware that the principle behind this list can be used in a whole variety of ways. But more on that later.

In an earlier post  I wrote about the question “What can be done now?” and suggested that it was the best way to keep up with projects.

However another question “What needs to be done now?” is very useful, especially when faced with an unexpected emergency or a situation for which it would have difficult to plan.

Take for instance the classic work disaster scenario which I am sure all of us have experienced at one time or another. You have a presentation to make in the afternoon and have left enough time in the morning to finalise the arrangements. But early in the morning a major crisis occurs with one of your clients and you suddenly realise that instead of having plenty of time to get ready for the presentation, you now have hardly any.

Repeatedly asking yourself the question “What needs to be done now?” or “What needs to be done next?” can help to defuse the situation. You answers to the question might be something like this:

    * * Write a list of essential preparations for the presentation
    * * Decide which you could ask other people to do, and which you will need to do yourself.
    * * Ask the other people
    * * Do the most important thing on the list, and so on.

When you look at a list like this it may all seem totally obvious, but that is the whole point. When we suddenly come under pressure, we have a tendency to panic and start reacting to one thing after another in a mindless sort of way. “Running around like a headless chicken” is the way it is usually described. By asking a question which engages the rational mind we can bring the situation back under control. Remember it is usually not so much the situation but the way we react to the situation which causes the problem.

Another example of a situation when this question is ideal is when you have been asked to help at a function in vague terms which don’t give you much idea of what is involved. Say that you have been asked to come and help at a charity function. You have no idea what that help is going to entail, though you suspect that putting up tents and carrying chairs is going to be a large part of it! Asking the question repeatedly of yourself and others can keep you well on top of the situation.

In fact it is a very good question to ask whenever you don’t have a plan. If you’ve got fed up with your To Do list or Will Do list and want to work for a while in greater freedom, then this is the question to be asking yourself as you go through the day.

Note that the question is couched in impersonal terms. Asking “What needs to be done now?” produces less resistance in your mind than “What do I need to do now?”

So ask yourself: “What needs to be done right now?”

I’m trying out a “brilliant idea” which struck me yesterday. For a few days I had been experimenting with the idea of writing out a to do list for the day and then putting it away in a drawer (real or virtual) and only looking at it at the end of the day. The idea was that it would mobilise the unconscious mind to get on with the tasks without the necessity to be constantly referring to the list.

The only trouble with that idea was that it didn’t work. On Friday I managed to spend the whole day without doing a single item on the list. I did plenty of other things but the “hidden list” seemed to repel me rather than attract me to its contents.

So on Saturday morning I was pondering whether to continue with the experiment, when inspiration hit me. Instead of writing out what I felt I ought to do on Saturday, I would write out a list of what I actually thought I would do that day. I then put that list away in a virtual drawer, and found that it had precisely the effect on me that I hoped the original “hidden list” would have on me but didn’t. I found myself doing the things that I had predicted. At the end of the day I had done every single item on the list without referring to it once.

I’m doing the same thing today. And as you can see “Write a blog entry” is one of the things on the list. I also managed to get moving on a whole heap of papers which badly needed sorting.

I’ll be very interested to see how this works out. As always, comments are welcome - particularly from people who would like to try it themselves, or have done something similar in the past.

Follow-up to this posting

I am re-issuing some old articles as blog entries partly in order to get a new audience for them, and partly in order to get all my articles in one place. This is the second.

I’d be willing to bet that you, along with every other person reading this article, has at least one important project that would make an enormous difference to your life — if only you could get round to doing it!

In fact if you are procrastinating over only one important project you are a quite exceptional person. Most of us could produce a whole list of things we are procrastinating about. Not only do we procrastinate about things we’d really much prefer not to have to do at all (such as getting our tax returns in on time), but we even manage to procrastinate about things we are fully committed to and enjoy doing. Most authors love writing or they wouldn’t be authors, but “writer’s block” is so common that the phrase has become proverbial.

Strangely enough, for all the havoc that it wreaks in people’s lives, procrastination is extremely easy to overcome. All you have to do is to use the “I’ll just get the file out” technique and you will find that it will vanish out of your life.

Here’s how it works. When the inner voice of conscience tells you that you really must get moving on that important report, if you are like most people your usual reaction will be to find something else to do (such as tidying your pencils, making a cup of coffee, going and chatting to your friends, etc. etc.).

Instead say “I’ll just get the file out”. Once you’ve got the file out you have a choice: you can either put the file away again, or you can do some work on the report. It’s up to you. Nine times out of ten you will probably do at least some work on the report. And if you do the same thing the following day and then the following, the report will be completed before you know it.

This technique can be applied to virtually anything that you find yourself resisting. Yesterday afternoon (a Sunday) I felt that all I wanted to do was to veg out in front of the TV. But I had a whole load of tasks which I’d promised myself I’d do that afternoon, which included washing the dishes, mowing the lawn, going for a walk and writing some more of my book. I got myself moving by saying “I’ll just fill the washing up bowl with hot water”. Magically I found the washing up was done. Then I said “I’ll just get the lawnmower out of the shed”. Again magically I found the lawn had been mown. Then I said “I’ll just walk to the end of the front drive”. Fifty minutes later I got back from a long, fast walk through the woods and fields. And finally I said “I’ll just open the Word file for my book”. A thousand words later I felt very virtuous indeed!

There will be days when I say “I’ll just open the Word file for my book” and that will be all I do. But that doesn’t matter. The important thing is that I did something. And that will keep the project alive and developing.

Hey, how did this article get written? All I said was “I’ll just write the headline for the next article”!

Delegation is one of the secrets of good time management. But many people are reluctant to delegate because it often seems more trouble than it’s worth. When people you are depending on forget important tasks or miss deadlines it can be more than frustrating - it can be positively damaging. So here’s my Top 10 Tips on how to delegate effectively. And if you have a tip which you think should be in the Top 10, then tell us about it in the Comments.

1) Ask yourself which parts of your work can only be done by you. Then aim to delegate as much of the rest as possible so that you are free to make the most of your own work.

2) Never delegate even the simplest task without saying when you want it completed by.

3) Where possible, get the person to set the deadline themselves. Make it clear that you expect them to keep to it.

4) Always put a follow-up reminder in your schedule or Task Diary to check that the work has been done. Everytime you fail to do this, you have lost control of that part of your work.

5) Always chase work immediately if it hasn’t been done by the time you requested it. If you don’t, they will think it’s not important.

6) Break down large tasks into stages and set deadlines for each. Spell out what should have been achieved at each deadline. Don’t say “Let me know in a week’s time how you’re getting on”. Instead say “Send me the draft for the first section by lunchtime Friday.”

7) Remember you can delegate upwards and sideways as well as downwards, and the same rules apply when you do.

8) When someone overruns a deadline don’t say “Why haven’t you done it?”. Instead say: “I’m not interested in why you haven’t done it. What I want to know is when you will have done it.”

9) Remember no one is going to give the work they are doing for you more importance than you give it. So if they think you don’t care about it, why should they?

10) Remember that people whose time management is bad tend to react to what is making the most noise at the time. The way to get them to give your work priority is to make more noise than the other calls on their time.

If anyone consistently fails to do the work you are asking them to do in spite of your keeping to these rules, then you should cease to use their services. You are not doing them any favours by ignoring their poor performance.

It’s never very long before the subject of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” gets raised in discussion on this site. So it’s good news that, after a gap of many years, he has now written another book. I’ve just pre-ordered it from amazon.co.uk and I’ll be looking forward to reading it.

According to his website:

“Making It All Work” addresses: How to figure out where you are in life and what you need; How to be your own consultant and the CEO of your life; Moving from hope to trust in decision-making; When not to set goals; Harnessing intuition,spontaneity, and serendipity; And why life is like business and business is like life.

In my article The Procrastination Buster I talked about how resistance to a task tends to be relative. To give an example, if you are faced with a choice between doing a difficult task and an easy task, the easy task will obviously be the easy option. However if you are faced with a choice between the same difficult task and another even more difficult task then the difficult task will seem to be the easy option.

In the article I developed this principle into a simple system of dealing with an open to do list. The idea is to work through the to do list comparing each task in turn with the next task on the list and doing the one which you are resisting the least. That way each task you do seems like the easy option, even though it may be quite difficult.

The main problem I found in dealing with a to do list in this way was that, as the list gets longer, it can take a very long time to work from one end of the list to the other. In fact if one is adding items fast enough, one never gets to the end of the list!

A simple modification makes the method work much better. Instead of comparing each item with the next item on the list, you compare the first item on the list (i.e. the oldest) with the last item (the newest).

So to illustrate, your list might read as follows:

• Clear email
• Tidy desk
• Sort out ordering system
• Return client’s phone call

You compare the first item with the last item. Which is easier, check email or return the client’s phone call?

You decide to return the client’s phone call. During the call various action items came up which you added to the list. So it now reads:

• Clear email
• Tidy desk
• Sort out ordering system
• Return client’s phone call
  
• Forward July forecast to client
• Ask boss about how to handle Project X

Once again you compare the first item with the last item. You decide to clear: your email. Once you have finished it, the list reads like this:

• Clear email
• Tidy desk
• Sort out ordering system
• Return client’s phone call
  
• Forward July forecast to client
• Ask boss about how to handle Project X
• Read Project Y report
• Investigate www.markforster.net

So you now have a choice between tidying your desk and investigating my website. Which are you going to choose?

What I have found is that because the list is being tackled at both ends, it tends to get less bogged down than the previous method I recommended.

If you’re someone who likes to work off an open to do list, then why not try this method out and see how you get on? All feedback will be appreciated.

What do you do when the inevitable happens and all your systems for time management collapse?

Typically this happens when you get an unexpectedly high work load, or you go away for a period and fail to get going again on return. Or perhaps your computer crashes and it takes three days to fix - and everything else gets thrown out of the window. Or perhaps you’ve just goofed off for a day or two and are now experiencing the knock-on effects.

Under all this pressure, you tell yourself that you’ve got too much of a crisis to be systematic. In fact you may well tell yourself “I can’t get the system going again now - I’ll wait until things settle down a bit”.

This is of course exactly the wrong approach. When things are really tough is the precisely the time that you most need to be systematic. When you find yourself in a crisis, you need to tighten up on the system not let go of it. Because it will be the system that enables you to get through the crisis in good shape. 

Remember: When the going is difficult is when you need your system the most. 

It can however be very hard to get the system going again because often people don’t know where to start.

With the Do It Tomorrow system it’s easy - provided that you focus on the right place. And that is to get your Will Do list ready for the following day, or if possible even for the current day.

Everything else can be dealt with by making a Backlog of it. Make the Backlog the first item on the Will Do list and you are on top of your work again.

So, to sum up, when things get out of hand don’t try to struggle on and catch up. Declare a backlog, and focus on getting your Will Do list going again.

Related articles:

Getting Going Again 

Backlog of Backlogs 

I’ve just discovered that I have a Wikipedia entry!

I wonder how long that’s been there?

October last year apparently.

And who wrote it?

“Wirefree” - no other details.

The writer’s done a reasonable job but there are a few inaccuracies.

Never mind!