I recently read Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management by Mark Forster. I came across this book as a suggested reading from Kourosh Dini after reading his book and going through his course Workflow Mastery.
Forster incorporates some of the aspects of Getting Things Done, but questions many aspects of modern time management, such as the idea of prioritization. With prioritization, Forster writes that we may never get to some of our projects. This rang true for me. Forster states that our daily work should amount to as much incoming work as we get in a day. He therefore suggests putting a one day buffer between tasks, so that any incoming work today gets added to tomorrow’s list. For today, if you are following his guidelines, you should be working on a closed list of items that amounts to a day’s work. The term closed list means you are not adding any additional items to the list, although of course you would need to make an exception for urgent items. He also addresses how to avoid urgent items in the in the book as well.
I have been using his strategies since I read the book a couple of months ago. I find that it is very well suited to using Things as my task manager, since a key feature of Things is the Today view. As I suspected, I immediately noticed that I have far more work to do in a day than could possibly be completed. That is one of the advantages of this strategy – Forster writes that organizing our day this way helps us to gauge our workload. When things are not going well, he suggests three questions: Am I working efficiently enough? Do I have too much work? Am I giving enough time to my work?
Considering my own situation, I do need to work on getting to a manageable workload. First and foremost, I am working on cleaning up my project list and considering what I can commit too. This is another concept I liked from Forster’s book – being committed to what we have agreed to do. I tend to have many projects and ideas that are in the “Someday/Maybe” category that are not moving forward. Rather than having this type of clutter in our systems, Forster suggests having one “Current Initiative.” For most people, clearing their backlog of projects will be their first Current Initiative, but once that is done, we can focus on those projects that are important, but have been lingering.
Reading this book also helped remind me of several key strategies for avoiding procrastination, which definitely plays a role in my overloaded to-do list. For example, Forster recommends doing a little bit on each project often, rather than long stretches of work while all of your other projects languish. I definitely recommend this book as a complement to Getting Things Done and other productivity books.
Scott Reindl 