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Suggest Questions for our interview w/ Mark Forster (Do It Tomorrow Author)

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mouser:
let me report a little how i am using some DIT forster ideas, and then where i think i need the most help in my system which im hoping the forster interview might help.

i've taken to heart forster's advocacy of closed lists and WILL DO lists instead of TODO lists.
for me this means: writing each action on an index card by itself, and never ADDING to an index card.
then at the begining of a day assembling a day's worth of index cards to form my WILL DO list.
because the cards are never allowed to add info to them, they are "closed" and can only be accomplished or put back pending completion.  As forster says i do find this to be more satisfying and easy to manage than crossing items off a growing todo list.  i actually like this a lot (ps i paperclip related cards so i can still keep related stuff together).

what i still haven't mastered:
getting myself to work on non-discrete non-snack items that i am resisting.

in general i find gtd and dit very helpfull in managing the tons of small things i have to do.

forster (unlike allen's GTD) actually spends time talking about strategies for working on bigger projects "little and often", but it's so hard for me to do this in practice.  so for me personally, i'm most interested in hearing him reflect on these issues (especially since gtd doesn't address this at all).  Intuitively i believe in my heart that the "little and often" strategy is a very good one.  but actually finding the discipline to do it is the hard part for me.

I guess what i would love to hear the most is forster just elaborating on his thinking in this area, especially with regard to techniques and tricks that may be useful in overcoming the resistance of the subconscious primitive mind (as he discusses in DIT).

It would also be very informative to hear him talk about his evolution in thinking over the course of his books, as Nudone as mentioned.

tomos:
I cannot predict how many ideas I'm going to have in a day. Nor how long it'll take to action those ideas. This is, I think , not exclusive of academics: can a programmer estimate how many bugs he can find in a day? And how long a bug will need to get fixed? Tough call sometimes.-urlwolf
--- End quote ---
You're probably aware of this aspect:

I'm just reading in Forster (DIT Chapter 13 I think - I can check if you want) about projects/ideas that you want to do as opposed to projects you need to do.

He also describes them as projects that dont have a deadline & recommends picking one & concentrating on that till its done then going on to the next.

I realise that may not be appropriate to a lot of situations, but it could possibly reduce the idea of certain things (ideas/projects) as a backlog?
Which I reckon must be helpful - "backlog" seems like a weight on the shoulders to me!

I'm concentrating on getting a organisation/time-managemnet/system of sorts going here, (apart from the work I have to do) and then I'm going to settle down to next "project" ... actually writing this makes me realise a lot of things I want to do can go on this list - could call it the wish-do-list maybe :)

brownstudy:
urlwolf -- I apologize for the condescending tone of my reply to your post. I obviously had not read your earlier posts or totally misunderstood your questions. I'm sorry.

Have you heard of the Google Group for academics?
Google Groups: The Efficient Academic
"Description: Professors, Instructors, and Graduate Students interested in getting things done more easily and quickly. We discuss organization, task management, and tools that helps us to be more productive and not procrastinate. We tend to discuss David Allen's GTD system but not exclusively. (533 members) "
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/The-Efficient-Academic?lnk=lr

I'm not a member of the group. Given your environment, which has hard landscape stuff like classes to teach, and then your own projects to manage, that group might have things to contribute.

BTW, thanks for bringing Forster's book to the forum for discussion. I think it's a worthwhile addition to any discussion on task management.

I think, given your generation of ideas and projects, both Forster and Allen would advocate writing them down on a list and then regularly reviewing that list to see which projects are ready to be started. It sounds like there is only one of you, after all, and you can't do everything. I've heard most GTD people give a rule of thumb that they only put enough stuff on their context lists that they think they can get to that week. At the next weekly review, they then put new tasks on the context lists for the upcoming week. (At least, that's one way to do it.)

Yeah, "someday/maybe" as a list title sounds better than "backlog." :) I tend to think of backlogs as temporary and something to which I can't add any more items. Whereas my someday/maybe list can go on and on forever.

There's also Neil Fiore's book THE NOW HABIT which gets talked about on the productivity boards. He advocates using an "uncalendar." I think it works like this (haven't read the book): Take a weekly calendar. Block out all the times you're already obligated for: work, sleep, dinner, exercise, time with your spouse, etc. Look at whatever time is left: that's how much time you have this week to work on what really matters to you, to read that book, etc. So then you have to decide what projects you can do or get started on in the time that's left. So instead of starting out with a big list of things and an empty calendar, you start out with a blocked-out calendar and then figure out what tasks will fill up the remaining time. (If anyone has read the book, check me on that description.)

Have you read Cory Doctorow's notes on Corey O'Brien's talk in 2004  that started the whole life-hacking thing? (http://www.craphound.com/lifehacks2.txt) Its focus is on how top-producing geeks get so much done. I don't know how much there would be useful to you, but one detail I could never get out of my head: one of the respondents said he kept his tasks in a single todo.txt file which he deleted every year, and then started fresh the next year. I'm too much of a packrat to do that but I admire the sentiment of junking old ideas and starting fresh with new ones. (I think Corey's presentation is archived somewhere on the web, but I can't lay my hands on the URL at the moment.)

Apropos of nothing, there is also this nice little essay from the PigPog blog:
GTD's Dirty Secrets | PigPog
http://pigpog.com/node/1462

Cheers -- mike

nudone:
i read 'The Now Habit' a couple of weeks back. your uncalendar description sounds right to me (without checking the book again). i don't really remember much about the book except that you could tell it precedes things like GTD and DIT. it's obvious Forster has read it.

overall, the book seemed to be aiming at the psychological problems of procrastination - the underlying cause of it all. well, that's what i took from it.

Arjen:
I'm interested to hear what Mark Forster has to say about the following points - they're quite specific to programmers / web surfers:


* How to deal with aimless surfing on the internet, but still allow yourself to visit sites or search for topics that interest you. For example: I'm interested to read what people have to say on these forums, but it's so easy to read more and longer than I'd like to.
* I can spend hours on a (programming) problem and make very little progress. Maybe that's how programming works sometimes, but I'd like to hear any suggestions on how to stay focussed, how to tell yourself when to stop looking for a solution for the problem or start looking for alternatives.
* Tips on estimating the time needed for a programming project.

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