Mark Forster's Blog

Seminar Booking Now Open

Mark Forster — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:39:11 +0000

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Introductory “Do It Tomorrow” Seminar (half day)
A basic introduction to the principles of DIT

Thursday, May 29th (afternoon)
Saturday, May 31st (morning)
Thursday, June 5th (afternoon)
Wednesday, June 25th (afternoon)
Wednesday, July 9th (afternoon)
Tuesday, July 22nd (afternoon)
Saturday, August 2nd (morning)
Tuesday, August 12th (afternoon)

Advanced “Do It Tomorrow” Seminar (full day)
For those who have read the book or have been on an introductory course

Saturday, June 28th
Thursday, July 17th
Thursday, August 14th

“Solving the Problem of Other People’s Time Management” (half day)
You’ve sorted your own time management out, but that’s only half the problem. What do you do about your boss’s, colleagues’, subordinates’, clients’, and suppliers’ terrible time management?

Tuesday, June 10th (afternoon)
Thursday, July 3rd (afternoon)
Wednesday, August 20th (afternoon)

All seminars will take place in Horsham, West Sussex, United Kingdom.

Price:

£100 half day
£225 full day (£200 for those who book a half day seminar at the same time)
Plus VAT

Booking opens Tuesday May 6th

Download Booking Form:
PDF Format
Word7 Format

What can be done now?

Mark Forster — Fri, 02 May 2008 16:58:09 +0000

I am often asked a question about how one choses what items you should put in the Task Diary for tomorrow. My answer is always that you should always be as up-to-date as possible with all current projects. Therefore any actions which can be taken now should be put in the task diary.

This adheres to the basic “Do It Tomorrow” principle that prioritising should not normally be done at the task level. It should be done at the project level.

What tends to happen is that when people get under pressure they tend to try to prioritise tasks. This is rarely very successful because all that happens is that tasks get put off to days in the future. But those future days are going to be just as full as today is.

Keeping on top of projects is the best way to ensure that you are forced to prioritise at the project level. If you can’t keep on top of all your projects, then you need to look at your current projects and decide which ones should be de-activated, either temporarily or permanently.

Before I wrote DIT, I used to recommend people to use the question “What needs to be done now?” with reference to projects. In full the question would be something like:

If this report is going to be written by the end of the month, what needs to be done now?”

Nowadays the question I recommend is:

If this report is going to be written by the end of the month, what can be done now?

The effect of the first question is to push action back until it needs to be done. This makes it very vulnerable to unexpected interruptions. Actually there’s no such thing as “unexpected interruptions”. Interruptions are a fact of life. Leaving action until it needs to be done tends to result in deadline pressure and over commitment.

The second question on the other hand has the effect of encouraging you to start action at the beginning of the time available for its completion. This gives you much more leeway if things go wrong (which they will). It is also a strong disincentive to over committing yourself.

Delays

Mark Forster — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 10:42:11 +0000

There’s a slight delay in publishing the new seminar schedule and this week’s newsletter which it was supposed to be in. This is due to the fact that my back has decided to give out and any movement at the moment is agony!

Hopefully in a few day’s time I will be fully recovered.

Getting Back on Track

Mark Forster — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:22:56 +0000

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

Diet Progress Report

Mark Forster — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:12:44 +0000

My diet is still going strong, and I am right on target having lost 12 lbs in the 12 weeks since the beginning of the year.

One problem that I am coming across is an increasing tendency to cheat. The trouble is that after one has cheated once it becomes easier to cheat the next time. Cheating of course is self-defeating in this diet as all that happens is that the rules get tighter and tighter.

So I am going to be really strict with myself from now on: NO CHEATING!

(Full details of the diet I have been following are given in my article Can I Improve on the “No S” Diet.)

Related:

Yaro Starak: How to Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up

Mark Forster — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:06:31 +0000

There was a great post on Yaro Starak’s blog “The Entrepreneur’s Journey” yesterday entitled How To Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up.

Seminars

Mark Forster — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:58:00 +0000

I’m just in the process of drawing up a schedule of seminars for the rest of the year. My current plans include running the introductory three-hour “Do It Tomorrow” seminars again, which I haven’t run since 2006, plus some more one-day follow-up seminars. I might possibly do both as a package for a reduced price. I’ll also be investigating the possibility of doing some teleseminars for those who are unable to make it to the South East of England.

I’m also thinking of doing a few seminars on other subjects. One subject which is particularly attractive to me is “How to Manage Other People’s Time”. This is a subject which will interest anyone who has ever tried to get other people to do things on time (or indeed at all) - that is to say, everyone!

Another possible subject is “Accessing the Unconscious Mind”.

I’d welcome suggestions for other subjects.

Meanwhile here is the feedback from the one-day “Do It Tomorrow” seminar which I ran last Thursday:

“A really good seminar that will start the process for me to get back to basics with my time management. I am going to start using the processes discussed straight away (and read the book at the same time!)” James Reed.

“A great seminar - everything fell into place. I now feel confident that I will be able to put some order and structure into my work/life straight away. The day also helped with personal goal setting and achievement. Confirmation that we don’t need to overcomplicate things.” Neil Herries.

“Very useful to implement the Do It Tomorrow system. Helped to focus on my particular problem areas. Self-coaching technique was also helpful.” Lorraine Wakefield.

“A very useful review and very good clarification of points I had been unclear on - fixed some holds in my own time management.” Mike Collins.

“Thanks for being patient with me. I hope I can put it into practice. It’s heartening that the system is designed for people who aren’t naturally organised and that you’ve kept it simple!” Dominique.

“Very good seminar going through a number of aspects of the book in detail. The seminar (I hope!) will provide a greater focus to getting things organised in my working life and, by default, my personal life.” Mark Reed.

Layout and Advertisements

Mark Forster — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:48:37 +0000

I’ve come to the conclusion that the amount of income generated by the ads on this site is hardly worth the effort of inserting them. So over the next few days I will be removing all advertisements on this site, apart from those for my own books, and returning the layout of the blog to multiple postings on the page.

Dialoguing

Mark Forster — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:07:17 +0000

One of the techniques recommended in my book How To Make Your Dreams Come True is dialoguing. This is a very useful technique for accessing your own unconscious mind, and can sometimes provide remarkable insights. I want to show my readers how this technique works, so how are we going to do this?

The best way is by demonstration, so let’s show how we can cover this subject as a dialogue between two voices.

So who do these two voices represent?

In this case, they are simply you talking to yourself. In the book, you recommend having a dialogue with your “future self” - that is to say yourself after you have achieved your current major goals and vision.

The idea is that one voice is looking at the goal from the present, and the other is looking back from the perspective of having achieved it?

Yes, you’ve got it. It’s a powerful technique because research has shown that you get more creative answers from the perspective of “I’ve achieved the goal, and here’s how I did it.”

Rather than “I’ve got this goal to achieve. How on earth do I do it?”

That’s right! But that’s not the only way to use dialoguing. You can for example make one voice yourself, and the other an imaginary coach. That can be very powerful. And a lot cheaper than a real coach!

Or you can write an imaginary dialogue with someone you are having problems with - a difficult boss or customer or perhaps a member of your family. It’s amazing what you can learn from having to take the other persons point of view.

Isn’t there a danger that the dialogue will go something like this? “I have behaved perfectly and all the problems have been caused by you alone” - “You’re right, I can see it now, I most humbly apologize and beg your forgiveness.”

Funnily enough that’s very rare. The “other person” usually puts up a spirited defence! This can make you realise in no uncertain terms where the real other person is coming from. That of course will then make it much easier to have dealings with them in real life.

What about dialoguing with a “higher power”, like in Conversations with God?

Personally I think there’s a danger, because it’s supposed to be God you are speaking to, that you come to believe that the answers are infallible. You always need to keep the perspective that it’s an imaginary conversation and both parts are being written by you. Otherwise you will just end up confirming your own ideas, rather than challenging them.

What you are saying then is that dialoguing is a very useful tool, but that as with any other tool you need to be aware of its limitations.

Exactly that.

Related article:

Journalling Revisited

Weeding the Task Diary

Mark Forster — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 12:09:43 +0000

One of the problems with any time management system is that there is a tendency for the list of actions to expand until it becomes too large to be handled. This is because many of the tasks that you engage in result in your thinking of several others. For example, you might have a task for today “Investigate Program X”. That is naturally going to result in several further actions. Or you carry out the “next action” for some project, and that naturally leads you on to a further action with the same project. Although many tasks are one-offs without further action needed, they are outweighed by the tasks that lead on to further action or actions. This is just as true of the Task Diary in Do It Tomorrow as it is of any to do list.

You may also have random thoughts and ideas during the day which don’t arise out of other tasks. The best thing to do with these is to put them in the Task Diary to “think about”.

The result of all this is that the daily list of tasks in theTask Diary expands until it is no longer possible to get through it. When this happens some people try to deal with the problem by spreading the some of the tasks over the next few days. This is not a good idea as all it achieves is to disguise the fact that you now have more tasks than you can handle.

Although the “long stop” in DIT is the auditing procedure, it is much better to keep your Task Diary pruned so that you rarely or never need to go through this procedure.

A simple principle can achieve this:

Just because you have written something in the Task Diary doesn’t mean you have to do it.

It is a very good idea when you draw the line to close tomorrow’s list to go through the items and ruthlessly weed them of all items which are not 100 per cent necessary to your chosen focus. Everything that will disperse your focus or lead you off into sidetracks must go.

Doing this before you start on the list rather than after you are failing to get through it will strengthen your sense of achievement and focus rather than induce a sense of failure.

So to sum up:

By all means add everything you think of during the day to your Task Diary for tomorrow, but weed it thoroughly before you commit to actually doing it.

Related Discussions:

Task Diary

Task Diary and Spreading Out Tasks over the Week

Tasks That Do Not Need to Be Done This Week But Later…?

Related Article:

The Key to Keeping Your Work Focused