Get Everything Done

AF and DIT systems use closed lists to ensure visible progress. It's very uplifting to see such progress. Where else do we see this effect?

To clean up a messy room, start by making a commitment to not add to the mess. Then clean the room a bit at a time. It will get clean. A college professor once told me he could never get students to keep the darkroom lab in order no matter how many rules and signs he put up. Then one day he took all the signs down and put one up "Leave the room better than you found it", and it worked.

Dave Ramsey talks about a debt snowball, where you take your smallest debt, stop adding to it, and start paying it off. In short time, it's gone and you proceed to kill all your debts one at a time.

The Extreme Programming process empowers the customer to change the project requirements midstream. To manage this, the method institutes sprints: A fixed list of features is chosen to be worked on over two week. During those two weeks, the details of items on the list may be refined, but the list is fixed.

Email backlogs. Got 500 unread emails? Move them all to a new folder and stop adding. Now you can keep up with your empty inbox, and slowly resolve the backlogged folder.

There are more examples. Your turn.

I think you are over-looking the more important aspect of the closed list: getting real with your fantasies.

Make a commitment to keep your room "clean". Then over the course of the next couple of weeks, if you are not making progress, you might want to examine why you think such an activity is so important. Rather than researching pop-psych theories on motivation, progress, accomplishment and coming up with "life hacks" you could just realize you don't want to do it and the room doesn't seem to mind; dismiss it and move onto to the things which want your attention.

I less concerned about getting things done than participating less neurotically with reality.

If crossing something off due to dismissal counts as visible progress to you, then we are in complete agreement.

<<you could just realize you don't want to do it and the room doesn't seem to mind>>

Norman - this may be true for menial tasks like "clean room". Not sure it holds true for those projects (the really important ones) that create resistance.

Importance is related to resistance? That is a question for you to ponder.

Cleaning my room is something I do (not) to a degree most would be shocked at and yet I participate in things I hear others "try" to hard to accomplish all the time.

The solution to "resistance" is not tricks and hacks and willpower, but honest reflection about your role in the world around you. Nothing is important or everything is depending on who you ask.

The surest cure to "resistance" I have found is to stop trying. Sometimes that task gets taken care of, sometimes not. AF keeps me honest. Why all the effort, agita, anxiety over this one thing? Usually it comes down to vanity and pride. Redefine more realistically the task and get on with it, or give up.

Commitments themselves are the best closed list.

Provided the list of commitments is closed, Jacqueline. Some people get in trouble by regularly committing to more things.

True Alan, but I think the new system is better at filtering more things out, rather than in:

http://www.markforster.net/forum/post/684076#post684273

Norman, (Straying off topic)

I don't believe that importance is correlated to resistance. I consider one of the most important things I do at the moment to be playing with my young daughter, which I love and have no 'resistance' to whatsoever.

Nevertheless, it is a fact of life that some things which we don't want to do, have to be done. In general, I enjoy my work, but there are certain tasks which are necessary if I want to keep my job which are less enjoyable. These I just have to get through - to 'stop trying' I have found doesn't work for me. Rather, if I make a comittment to do them well (without perfectionism though) and crank through them, then they get done quicker, and more enjoyably. Mark's techniques can help make this process more pleasant and therefore bearable.

We are in complete agreement that investigating pop psychology theories as to exactly 'why' you are resisting tasks is completely counterproductive. (Reminds me of those mornings where I spend ages struggling to get up whilst my half-asleep mind debates whether, how and when I should get up, and exactly why it is I don't want to - better to just either accept I don't want to and get up anyway, or decide to have a good lie-in!)

I think the point with the clean room example is that it is just that - an example. There are a number of things we have to do whether we like it not, and whether we have resistance or not - for example your accounts for your business, your tax return and so on. I think this principle is good and we all get behind with things when life throws stuff at us. It's a good reminder of how to deal with backlog. Whether clean room is on your agenda or not is a matter of personal choice.

One of the real urika moments I had with Mark's books/website was this idea of a closed list that can deal with a backlog - i.e. draw a line under it, get working in real time to make sure you are on top of things, and deal with the backlog as a special project (or current intiative). I may be dim, but this was one of the best things I ever read.

Bringing it up for examination in a specific thread is helpful as it allows everyone to share different ways they have (or have not) used the principle in their own life. I am not an avid poster, but I do read a lot of the posts and these are the ones I find most helpful. I sort of know what I should be doing now, but i am still 'in training' and value these contributions.