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By Mark Forster
Before you read this, read this.
First, make a master list of every single thing you need to do – from the smallest items (wash the dishes, call the dentist), to the medium items (write English paper), to the big items (get a job).
Next to each item, write down how much time you estimate it will take to accomplish the task (5 minutes, 15 hours, 3 months), as well as your deadline for accomplishing the task. Looking at your deadlines, put an asterisk next to the tasks that need to be accomplished in the next week.
Here's a really good tip:
Now make a separate list of the things that you love to do that get in the way of you accomplishing what you want to accomplish (i.e. writing, yoga, hiking, cycling). These are your rewards. They are the positive consequences
Now make a list for tomorrow.
On this list should be some items that require little time and some items that require lots of time.
Include items that need to be accomplished immediately
Include items that are long-term.
Include items that you don’t mind working on
Include items that you dread like the plague. Limit the list to 5 to 7 items. Re-order the list to put the thing you are most dreading at the top, and put all the items in that order. The item you are most looking forward to should be at the end of the list. Next to each item, put how much time you want to spend on that item tomorrow. For a task that will eventually take 15 hours, maybe devote 1 hour to it today. For a task that will take 5 minutes, try to accomplish it today. Log your time. Are you most productive in the morning or most productive in the evening? Figure out what time tomorrow you want to start working on your list – a time when your brain is at its peak and you are most likely to be productive. Tomorrow, when you wake up, remind yourself what time you are going to start your list. Be thinking about your list before you start it, getting revved up emotionally to tackle it. An hour before you are set to start on your list, eat a meal. Don’t stuff yourself so much that you’re sleepy. While you’re eating, think about your list. At the allotted time, do item number one, the hardest item, on your list. Focus intently to get it accomplished. When you are done, or in the middle of it if necessary, take a 10-minute break by walking around your room, going to the bathroom, eating a quick snack, sending a quick text, petting the dog. Do not get involved in any activity that will take a lot of time and interfere with your productivity momentum. After a short break, tackle the second item on your list. Every time you accomplish an item, cross the item off your list, congratulate yourself, and take a short 10-minute break. It’s important while you’re in productivity-mode to not get side-tracked with long breaks or doing things that get in the way of your productivity. Jot these on a NDN (nod doing now) list. Give yourself 3 solid hours (uninterrupted time) to work on your list. Give yourself a 1 hour break. Eat a meal, talk to a friend, go for a walk or a ride. Clear your head. But still don’t get dragged into the things that really stop you from being productive, unless you have the ability to keep it to about 15 minutes. You still want to accomplish things after this break. Now return to your list and dedicate 2 more hours to it. If you need to do things out of order, or spend a different amount of time on things, that’s okay. Do as much as you can until your brain is fried and you can’t do another thing. Now reward yourself. You earned it. Spend time doing nothing but the things that you love (i.e. play ukulele, go for a hike, go to yoga). Stop thinking about lists and tasks, other than to allow yourself to feel good about what you accomplished today. After you’ve rewarded yourself, before you go to bed, take some time to look at your master list and today’s list. Make any changes you need to make to the master list, and pat yourself on the back again for everything that you accomplished on today’s list. Then make a list for tomorrow. Some daily lists will require 3 hours of effort from you; others may require 8 hours. Try to be realistic about how much time you commit to your list and balance it with time to reward yourself and enjoy life. Remember, all work and no play, etc. The author of this system aid it has worked for him for many years. FVP which follows is a variation of this process.
Perhaps the lesson here is really in prioritization. One of the real challenges in today's crazy busy culture is conflicting priories. One long list to capture just about every possible action that springs to mind. A minimum of special markings or annotations. There are three main requirements which have to be kept in balance:
Urgency
Importance
Psychological Readiness Traditional time management systems have tended to concentrate on the first two of these. The neglect of psychological readiness is probably the reason that most people don’t find time management systems particularly effective or congenial. The most distinctive feature of FVP is the way that its algorithm is primarily based on psychological readiness - this then opens the way to keeping urgency and importance in the best achievable balance.
The FVP algorithm uses the question “What do I want to do more than x?” to preselect a chain of tasks from the list. What exactly is meant by “want” in this context is deliberately left undefined. There may be a whole variety of reasons why you might want to do one thing more than another thing and all of them are valid.
The chain always starts with the first unactioned task on the list. Mark this task with a dot to show that it’s now been preselected. Don’t take any action on the task at this stage. This task then becomes the benchmark from which the next task is selected.
For example, if the first task on the list is “Write Report”, the question becomes “What do I want to do more than write the report?” You move through the list in order until you come to a task which you want to do more than write the report. This task is now selected by marking it with a dot and it becomes the benchmark for the next task. If the first task you come to which you want to do before writing the report is “Check Email”, then that becomes the benchmark.
The question therefore changes to “What do I want to do more than check email?” As you continue through the list you might come to “Tidy Desk” and decide you want to do that more than checking email. Select this in the same way by marking it with a dot, and change the question to “What do I want to do more than tidying my desk?”. The answer to this is probably “nothing”, so you have now finished your preselection. The preselected tasks in the example are:
Write report
Check email
Tidy desk
At this point “Tidy Desk” represents the task you most want to do at the moment. Do it.
Note that as in all my systems, you don’t have to finish the task - only do some work on it. Of course if you do finish the task that’s great, but if you don’t then all you have to do is re-enter the task at the end of the list.
Now what are you going to do next?
“Check email” is the previous task you selected, but that isn’t necessarily the task you most want to do. What you can say though is that it was the task you most wanted to do up until you selected “Tidy Desk”. This means that you only need to check the tasks that come after “Tidy Desk” in the list.
So what you do next is to ask yourself “What do I want to do more than check email?” again, but you check only the tasks which come after the task you have just done (Tidy Desk).
Once you have worked your way back to the first task on the list and done it (this may never happen!), you take the next unactioned task as your root task.
Examples follow:
In this example for ease of understanding no new tasks are added while working on the list. This of course is unlikely in real life.
Your initial list of tasks:
Email
In-Tray
Voicemail
Project X Report
Tidy Desk
Call Dissatisfied Customer
Make Dental Appointment
File Invoices
Discuss Project Y with Bob
Back Up
Put a dot in front of the first task:
‣ Email
In-Tray
Voicemail
Project X Report
Tidy Desk
Call Dissatisfied Customer
Make Dental Appointment
File Invoices
Discuss Project Y with Bob
Back Up
Now ask yourself "What do I want to do more than Email?"
You work down the list and come to Voicemail. You decide you want to do Voicemail more than Email. Put a dot in front of it.
‣ Email
In-Tray
‣ Voicemail
Project X Report
Tidy Desk
Call Dissatisfied Customer
Make Dental Appointment
File Invoices
Discuss Project Y with Bob
Back Up
Now ask yourself "What do I want to do more than Voicemail?" You decide you want to tidy your desk.
‣ Email
In-Tray
‣ Voicemail
Project X Report
‣ Tidy Desk
Call Dissatisfied Customer
Make Dental Appointment
File Invoices
Discuss Project Y with Bob
Back Up
There are no tasks you want to do more than tidying your desk, so you have the following dotted tasks:
Email
Voicemail
Tidy Desk
Do the Tidy Desk task.
Your list will now look like this:
‣ Email
In-Tray
‣ Voicemail
Project X Report
‣ Tidy Desk
Call Dissatisfied Customer
Make Dental Appointment
File Invoices
Discuss Project Y with Bob
Back Up
Now start again from Tidy Desk (i.e. the last task you did). and ask yourself “What do I want to do more than Voicemail?” The only task you want to do more than Voicemail is Back Up. Do it.
The list now reads:
‣ Email
In-Tray
‣ Voicemail
Project X Report
‣ Tidy Desk
Call Dissatisfied Customer
Make Dental Appointment
File Invoices
Discuss Project Y with Bob
‣ Back Up
There are no further tasks beyond Back Up, so there is no need to check whether you want to do any tasks more than you want to do Voicemail. You just do it.
The list now reads:
‣ Email
In-Tray
‣ Voicemail
Project X Report
‣ Tidy Desk
Call Dissatisfied Customer
Make Dental Appointment
File Invoices
Discuss Project Y with Bob
‣ Back Up
There is only one dotted task left on the list and that is Email.
You now need to check whether you want to do any of the tasks more than Email. So ask the question “What do I want to do more than Email?” You already know that you want to do Email more than In-tray, so you start scanning from the first task after the task you have just done (Voicemail).
You decide you want to do Make Dental Appointment more than you want to do Email, so you dot it and change the question to “What do I want to do more than Make Dental Appointment”. The answer is “Discuss Project Y”. As this is the last task on the list you do it immediately, and then do Make Dental Appointment immediately too. There’s no need to scan because you already know that you want to make the dental appointment more than you want to file invoices.
The list now reads:
‣ Email
In-Tray
‣ Voicemail
Project X Report
‣ Tidy Desk
Call Dissatisfied Customer
‣ Make Dental Appointment
File Invoices
‣ Discuss Project Y with Bob
‣ Back Up
So the tasks on the original list have been done in the following order so far:
Tidy Desk
Back Up
Voicemail
Discuss Project Y with Bob
Make Dental Appointment
These tasks have been done in the exact order of what you want to do most at the time. There may be a huge number of factors affecting what you want to do most, but you can allow your brain to sort them out for you below the level of consciousness simply by asking the question “What do I want to do more than x?” and applying it in the way shown above.
If you are having trouble following the example above, then I suggest you write the list out on paper and work through it by hand.
The best way to sink any time management system is to overload it right at the beginning. FVP is pretty resilient, but at this stage you aren’t. So build up the list gradually. My advice is to start off with the tasks and projects that are of immediate concern to you right now, and then add more as they come up in the natural course of things. Tasks can be added at any level, e.g. Project X, Plan Restructuring, Call Pete, Tidy Desk. If at any stage you find that a task on the list is no longer relevant, then delete it. If you find that your preselected list is no longer relevant (e.g. if you have had a long break away from the list or some new factor has come into play), simply cross out any tasks which need re-prioritizing and re-enter them at the end of the list. If one or more very urgent things come up, just write them at the end of the list and the algorithm will automatically select them next (assuming you do actually want to do them of course). Similarly if something already on the list becomes very urgent, then just cross it out and move it to the end of the list. Remember that the aim of any time management system is to help you to get your work done, not get in the way of doing your work. So don’t be afraid to adjust priorities as and when you need to. However don’t overdo this - stick to the rules when possible as they will ensure you deal with your work in a systematic way.
At the beginning of this article I said there were three factors which every time management system needs to address: urgency, importance and psychological readiness. Let’s see how FVP deals with each of these. Urgency. Because of the nature of the preselection process, urgent tasks tend to get selected because generally speaking the human brain wants to do things that it knows are urgent. If things come up that are particularly urgent they can be added to the preselected list at any time. Importance. Generally speaking the human brain is a bit less keen on doing important stuff than it is on doing urgent stuff. This is particularly the case when the important stuff is difficult. However the FVP preselection process ensures that the entire list is kept under continuous review and your brain will start to flag up that it wants you to get on with stuff it thinks you might be neglecting. If this doesn’t happen, then it’s likely to be because you would be better off getting rid of it altogether. Psychological Readiness. This is where FVP really enters new dimensions. By using a pre-selection process, the brain is softened up towards the selected tasks. But this isn’t all. The selection process is based on what you want to do. This colours the whole preselected list so that even tasks which seem like chores get affected. Unrelated...
As Forster spotlights in his book in relation to getting everything done: by scatter mapping, you will find that you have 'broken up the ground and the work itself will be much easier. Certainly that has been my experience through the years of using this method, whether to ease into an individual work day, or adapting to something new in my life as a whole.