Get Everything Done

Hi Mark and All,

One thing that is becoming more of a fear for me in DWM is the need to review so many pages to find what task I wish to do next. I am using a paper diary, and this is a genuine concern of mine. I know there are those out there that used to have 30+ pages active in AF1, but I never came close to that number. I don't see this as a show-stopper, but more of an irritant. Every time I am ready to choose the next task....I have so sort through so many pages. And which direction should I go? Do I start at the first page found forward of the current date, or do I start at the 30-day mark from today's date? For the next task, do I start where I left off?

I took an old 2009 diary and just filled in imaginary tasks for 30 days out....with some at 7 days out, etc. Then I started to use this and this is where my sense of too many pages to review began to take hold.

Perhaps I am seeing this wrong, but how is one supposed to rapidly determine task after task to do if one has to flip through so many pages each and every time? I am sure I doing something wrong, so please correct me, Mark.

Thanks!
-David

Of course, I may have overstated this a bit (hmmm....I seem to have a habit of doing that) and I could just continue to test and see how things work out. It may well be that my early fears are completely unfounded. I still do really like the idea of task commitment and the sense of seeing how much is on my plate and coming closer and closer to the do or die date.

-David

David, that was my main concern with DWM. Having tried it for a couple of days, I realised I could never work with my tasks spread over 30 days/pages.

I wanted to stay with DIT as I found it to be a system that really motivated me. It provides a structure and also allows me to say 'I've finished for the day' which I feel is important and which I never felt with AF. The only drawback I find with DIT is that I have days when I have no discretionary time to work on yesterday's tasks and then a backlog develops. So I was trying to come up with something which combined the structure of DIT with the flexibility of DWM.

Instead of writing all new tasks on the page which is one calendar month from today’s date, they are entered on the page which is one week from today. The exception is same-day urgent tasks which are written on today’s page.

Benefits - fewer pages to search through for tasks. A one-week window for tasks (as apposed to one-day window which DIT allowed).

Drawbacks - loss of the one-month window for tackling tasks.

However, some tasks which would otherwise be dismissed but MUST be done regardless, could be ‘forwarded’ by seven day by being rewritten (perhaps after re-phrasing) seven days ahead They should be annotated to show they have been given an extra week. To prevent endless putting-off of tasks, there could be a set number of times that a task can be forwarded by a week (say three times, which would then give all tasks potentially a one-month window.

David,

To anticipate Mark, you only work one task at a time. ;-) Seriously, it is not really the number of pages but the number of tasks that scares you, I'll bet. And that is a function of your life, more than the system.

In what way does DMW seem worse than any of the previous AF systems? They should ALL have had as many tasks and probably pages. (Well, now that I'm thinking of it, there may be more pages in DWM as some would be only partially filled. But then that should make you feel better, no?)

In any case, my experience is that I'm just looking at one task at a time and then I move to the next one. Most of the time I do nothing on the task I'm looking at and and keep moving on until I find one to work on. But then, as with some others here, I perform an initial scan and pull off a "hot list" to keep me on track with the important stuff.

The other factor to consider is the granularity of the tasks on your list. To the extent that you have lots of tasks, they should each be "smaller" ones. At the other end of the spectrum are huge tasks but then they should be few, I would guess that there is some optimum size for tasks on your list that would make you happy. Maybe some tasks on you list need to be "projects" that have a number of smaller tasks implied (or listed elsewhere).

Hi Linda,

Your suggestions of limiting tasks forward only a week is intriguing. Most people think of a week as the period of time for planning and this has been discussed in time management articles and books for some time now. Covey obviously focused on the week. Hmmmm.

Since I am testing Mark's system, I will stick with his rules per his request to give the system a good testing period. We will see how this goes....

-David

Good points as usual, Mike. I will continue to test following Mark's rules.

-David

I am one of the people who find it uncomfortable to have so many pages to be continually cycling through.

I know what I am doing is not DWM, but I have found the setup of the list to be very useful to me, combined with a DIT-like approach. I have set up a looseleaf booklet with the pages labeled with dates (One page, for example, is labeled "expires March 7; Enter Feb. 7, Reenter Feb. 28). I am using a 28-day cycle, to keep the days of the week consistent, and I have movable tabs so that I can find the pages easily.

Here is where my procedure is different. Every morning, I go through the list very carefully, considering each item. If it is something I am fairly sure I want to do today, I put it on the today page of my calendar (a separate booklet from the list, with my calendar on the same page). I then work from that short list throughout the day. As new things come up, I usually put them on my today/calendar page, even if I have no intention of doing the thing today.

At the end of the day (or first thing next morning) I take any undone tasks, or things that were added during the day, and add them back onto the Big List, at the 7-day or the 28-day point, as appropriate.

This allows me to be much more focused on what I really need to do. I found, when using AF, the multi-page list was too scattered for me. I felt overwhelmed.

Really, the major difference in my approach is that I make one very thoughtful, careful pass through the list each day, rather than cycling through it continuously.

I realize this is enough of a divergence that Mark would say it is not DWM, but it is working exceedingly well for me so far, and I am grateful for all the information from this site which inspired it. I think it gives me the best features of both DWM and DIT.

~Sarah J

I should clarify that I cross things off the Big List as I write them on my "today" list.

Sarah, FWIW that's exactly how I (and Simon I think) used to do AF condensed last year without the add back to the 7 & 28 day points. It worked very well, probably best for those who get easily overwhelmed by a big list.

I've been looking at a similar concept but I don't prescan the whole list and choose everything in the morning. I still follow the page by page approach of scanning for tasks, during the day.

What I do have in common with Sarah, is that I'm rewriting tasks on a temporary working page instead of directly on page 7. At end of day I transfer those items back to page 7. It's just a little handier to have that separate workspace always visible than going to the right calendar page. And it's also helps to see what I've been up to so far this day.

Mark
<The number of pages really does not make much difference to the time needed to find the next task.>

No, it doesn’t the problem is not about finding the next task, it’s about finding a task that I could have done more easily if I’d batched it along with a similar task I did earlier.If I've just checked my bank statement on my PC, then it would really be a good idea to do the task 'amend standing order payment' while I'm logged in. If I've got the mop and bucket out and have just washed the kitchen floor, I want to know if 'wash the bathroom floor' is also on the list. There is always a start-up overhead in any task - getting the file out, filling the mop bucket etc. and it feels more efficient to me to group similar tasks. Hence my problem with spreading tasks over 30 pages.

I realise this is not the same as letting a task 'stand out' which is the basis of choosing tasks in AF and DWM. Perhaps this is why I struggle with the practice of it (though not the principle).

Linda,

As I am doing DWM I realize that the task I want to do is effectively on the same page or on the next one (or close to the the 1 week or 1 month page, which are in fact the most active pages, the other pages have very few tasks on them).
You may try to trust the system and do it within the rules and if you find afterwards that you should have done a task you haven't found you could report the problem and the situation to Mark, so he could take it in account next time he revises the system.
Don't be afraid to make mistakes (you should know DWM is in alpha, preview, or test version what you may like to call it).

If you implement it numerically you can browse the list more quickly, you could also write tags or context so you could find all the task related easily.
Do you want to take the time and thought to write the context for each task or not, I think this is a personnal choice^^

I used DWM for shopping today.
I remembered I entered 2 things to buy at the drugstore but didn't remember which ones.
Once at the drugstore I looked at my list until I find the two tasks and I was done.
But is it is more effective to have a separate list I would like to know how many separate list do we need and how to handle them? How many lists do you have mark?
I still have some difficulties to handle errands effectively.

My policy is to always create a list when it occurs to me something should have a list. That isn't often. For example, when I write my second shopping task in DWM, I remember there's another, and I start a list. When I get to the other, I remember I have a list, put it on there, and delete that task because the other task already references the list. [or maybe I'll delete the other task because this one came first.]

I do what Alan does regarding shopping items. I keep my shopping lists on a post-it note on an expired page at the beginning of the list.

Linda,

>>it’s about finding a task that I could have done more easily if I’d batched it along with a similar task I did earlier.<<

Just curious, but how did you keep those tasks together in AF? (if you were doing AF) After a few days, things there were entered at the same time, ended up on different pages as some got actioned and some didn't (or didn't get actioned as often)

Same way: a separate list, and only one AF task.

About the number of pages: in addition to doing just one task at a time, I draw a line on "yesterday+7" and "yesterday+30" closing the lists (Mark suggested doing that when somebody asked how to distinguish re-entered tasks from new tasks). Whenever I finish one of these closed lists, I draw a big red X over the whole block. Result: "empty" pages are easy to see.

About shopping lists: as mentioned by Sarah, post-it notes are wonderful - but I move it to "today+7" whenever I update it - along with the task to go to the given shop.

Lillian

I didn’t manage to keep my tasks batched in AF – that was the problem. I never managed to handle recurring tasks successfully in AF. In the end, the way I decided to take recurring daily and weekly tasks out of AF altogether, and work them according to a checklist approach, in a DIT way.

Mark
< Since I'm circulating through my list several times a day I know what's on it.>

That’s maybe the difference, Mark. I have two or three days at a time when I can’t work my list as I’m teaching or in meetings (apart from adding more tasks at the end) and so I’ve forgotten what’s on the list when I come back to it. Sometimes, when I feel overwhelmed, it helps to write down a set of context-type headings and then write my tasks under those headings so I can 'see' more clearly what they are.

Maybe I suffer from list-lexia ( a kind of mental confusion when confronted with a long list of tasks)!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, DWM seems to be extremely well suited to electronic format. Personally, I am using Toodledo, sync'ed to iPhone. But, any electronic todo app will do. The way I use it --
* When I enter a new task, I put a due date 1 month from today
* When I work on a task and re-enter, I modify the due date to 1 week from today
* The tasks are sorted by due date. So, the first set of items are always the ones which are due within the week.
* I also put a star on items that I feel is extremely important to work on
* Every day, I scan the full list before attacking the list paying careful attention to starred items - this is especially useful when I am away for a few days and come back. When I do come back, I refresh the list by shifting the due-dates by the number of days I was gone.
* With any system (various versions of AF or DIT or DWM), the one thing I find very difficult (for me) is to deal with very long list of items. So, I have been conscious of putting only the items that I am reasonably committed to. I put the rest in a place holder. I do review those every week or 10 days to see if they are ready to be committed.

GC

<< Since I'm circulating through my list several times a day I know what's on it.>>

<That’s maybe the difference, Mark. I have two or three days at a time when I can’t work my list as I’m teaching or in meetings (apart from adding more tasks at the end) and so I’ve forgotten what’s on the list when I come back to it. Sometimes, when I feel overwhelmed, it helps to write down a set of context-type headings and then write my tasks under those headings so I can 'see' more clearly what they are.>

I think Linda is right; that is the difference. With all the AF versions, it was rare that I would ever cycle through the list more than once or twice, even when I did have time to work the list. But there were sometimes days at a time that I wouldn't get enough time to do the list at all. And I'd lose what little sense of confidence I had that I knew what was on the list.

Perhaps because I am taking comprehensive exams this week, and my time has been very limited, I know I would be setting myself up for failure if I worked the list the way Mark describes.

But in a 15-minute morning planning session, with my coffee, I do have a pretty good sense of what I can do in a day, so I feel comfortable with one daily pass through the list, making a separate, short list of what I need to do that day. If I underestimate myself, I can always cycle through again later, and that did happen once.

Next week, when life is more normal, I may try cycling through the list throughout the day, to give it a fair chance. But I may decide that it's working fine this way. I do know I am always more comfortable with a short list I can see on one page.