Live in The Future. It's Starting Now.

The best way to accomplish things, as painlessly as possible, is a subject I’m interested in, and care a lot about. This is going to be the first of a series of postings on how to approach turning ideas into output, and how that means turning dreams into reality. Let’s start by framing the problem a litte, or at least a key piece of it.

Ever since David Allen came out with the Getting Things Done approach to productivity—and even well before that—the “To Do” list has been a staple of turning dreams and ideas into reality. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work for a lot of people: they get the list part done, or done enough as far as their concerned, and then go right back to getting caught up in the same old reactive circle of “Now, what? Now, what?”, and the list sits around, unaddressed and frequently unconsulted. Eventually a new list is made and—except perhaps by happenstance—duly ignored. It’s much easier, in a way, to get caught up in distractions, reactions, interruptions and procrastination that to actually attack that list we made.

This is where the rubber actually meets the road: it’s not enough to make To Do lists—although you can take it as a necessary, yet insufficient, condition for getting to a point where you’re actually being productive while incurring the minimum amount of pain in staying that way. All too often, a “To Do” list can be a way of putting off actually doing the things you’re writing up on your list. It’s easy to mistake having made up a To Do list for having done something, and taking the rest of the afternoon off. (I’ve done it; I bet you have, too.)

This is a weak point for many people, and a cause of a lot of wasted time (and paper, and App Store downloads, etc.) What’s needed, beyond the simple list of things that you might potentially be doing—something which also requires some attention in its construction, and which will be the subject of a more detailed article—is two things:

1. A technique to actually choose an item from your list as something—the Right Thing—that you’re going to commit to doing at least something on, but right now.
2. A technique to help you actually work productively on the item you’ve selected. You don’t necessarily need to complete it immediately, but you need to have it further along, to some degree, than when you started, by the time you stop.

So, rather than go immediately to the mechanics of making a To Do list, I want to present how a list is actually worked once it’s been constructed, and only then talk about the best ways to construct one. This may seem counter-intuitive, but I’ve seen too many people get through the list building phase of  setting up a personal support system only to get bogged down once they had to actually follow through on the list they’d created. Before long, things had changed, the list was no longer terribly relevant—some things having been done, some having been ignored, but in a reactive and unplanned way. And the cycle gets repeated. Or not.

So, the first issue—what to work on, the subject of this posting—is, sadly, usually not very well addressed, and there are any number of different approaches that have been suggested. “A”, “B” and “C” priorities is a long-standing one, and Steven Covey’s “Four Quadrants” is a similar one. The problem with static approaches like these is that they don’t tend to be very responsive to the needs of the moment, and either you end up working on items which are actually not as important as you thought they were when you first prioritized them, or you end up feeling a resistance to working on them at all, which turns into procrastination all too often.

One of the best approaches, in my experience, is Mark Forster’s “AutoFocus System”, which Mark has very generously developed, in the open, as a free technique available to all. Mark’s approach is to do a “brain dump” along the lines of what David Allen suggests, into a notebook with 20-30 lines on a page (I use 3×5 cards, again, more on this in a future posting), and proceed to work the list as follows, one notebook page at a time:

1. Read quickly through all the items on the page without taking action on any of them.
2. Go through the page more slowly looking at the items in order until one stands out for you.
3. Work on that item for as long as you feel like doing so
4. Cross the item off the list, and re-enter it at the end of the list if you haven’t finished it
5. Continue going round the same page in the same way. Don’t move onto the next page until you complete a pass of the page without any item standing out
6. Move onto the next page and repeat the process
7. If you go to a page and no item stands out for you on your first pass through it, then all the outstanding items on that page are dismissed without re-entering them. (N.B. This does not apply to the final page, on which you are still writing items). Use a highlighter to mark dismissed items.
8. Once you’ve finished with the final page, re-start at the first page that is still active.

There are several advantages to this approach. First, you have a limited number of choices placed before you. A great deal of procrastination comes from having too many options to choose from. By sticking to the twenty or so items on a page, for the moment, you’re able to focus more realistically on them without feeling overwhelmed.

Second, the requirement that a task “stand out for you” is critical. We all know, really, what we ought to be doing, and productivity has a core requirement which is pointed out too infrequently: you have to be willing to be honest with yourself. This is a topic we’ll come back to when I go through the best way to construct your “To Do” list, or “Activity Inventory”.

Since we do know what we need to do—or at least have some sense of it—if we’re honest with ourselves (and we’ve been honest enough to construct our list with the right things on it, i.e. we’re not avoiding painful tasks by pretending they don’t exist), the thing we need to do really will “stand out for us”. It requires a leap of faith, at first, perhaps, but it’s a reasonable consequence of having some degree of awareness of what’s going on in your life. A To Do list can help you recall the things that you might be doing, but only you know what you should be doing Right Now.

No amount of pre-prioritizing can really tell you that (although it can potentially help, if used properly). This approach requires two things: the willingness to choose a task, and trust in your own ability to choose the one that best serves your interests in the moment of choosing.

Next: Now that you know what to work on, what’s next?