I add more tasks than I actually complete in a day. That means that my tasks will be probably unmanageable at some point. Long lists like that must be pruned, otherwise the weekly review won't be efficient.
Ah, then you haven't read Forster's Do It Tomorrow book. His system involves you learning what a day's work is for you, and not putting more on the daily task list than you can handle. If some new work drops in your lap today, AND IT'S NOT URGENT, then put it on tomorrow's list, or the next day's. Maybe you keep a separate list of tasks for a specific project with that project's support materials?
I think a lot of your questions are answered in the authors' respective books.
Hehe,
I have read DIT twice, I carry it around with me and today I forgot it at a bar. I brought DIT to this forum's attention, and I'm interviewing Forster sometime before the end of the month. It's really funny that you think the answers are in the book, while I explicitly came out with these questions while trying to implement DIT.
I think I didn't communicate well how these questions came up. Some clarification would be good. I still think the answer is not as simple as it seems. You will see how everything falls in place.
[WARNING: long post possibly approaching]
My system as it is today, open for public perusal.
I started with GTD. I did my brain dump and have a large hierarchical todo list, where top level branches are projects. Example, I have:
Business and career
academic
My family and friends
productivity/life
<Inbox>
Each branch has many projects. E.g. academic has 10 entries, which are papers I'm writing or grant proposals.
productivity/life contains:
improve GTD
read 43 foders back-on-gtd
finish forsters books, write review on my blog
sign up for forster seminar Oct 13 after reading his books
do exercise in GED about attention allocation percentages in excel
GTD weekly review
attend forster seminar
Among others.
Inbox may contain daily life chores (shuch as shopping, bills etc) that are not important enough to be allocated to a particular point in the tree.
Tasks are a mixture of recurrent/one-time with soft/hard deadlines. Some are small things like 'answer X's mail' (when it'll take a while to answer it), some a larger ones with subtasks. The total TODO list has 243 items. I add around 10 items a day, and may cross say 8, that's why I say that the list will grow instead of being reduced, with time.
When I come up with something that I need to do, I drop it in <INBOX>. These entries do not have a time assigned.
I barely use @contexts. Only @shopping and @phone. No urgency or importance is coded.
Then, I read GIT and liked it a lot. So I started implementing it in the following way.
I have two closed lists called Today and tomorrow. They are in a day planner format (e.g., from 9:00 to 22:00), but I don't use times, I just stretch the box to reflect an estimation of how long I think the task will take.
I drag and drop items from the long TODO list to the TODAY and TOMORROW will-do lists. Thus, the tasks I put in may come from the normal daily route (mails, etc) or from the vintage TODO list. I use the 1-day buffer and set stuff for tomorrow when they are not urgent.
Now, let's see how the questions sound under this new explanation.
Is my perfectly-normal-under-GTD todo list a backlog? If so, I have a huge backlog. I'm not sure attacking it under the current initiative would be the best. I'm not sure I can close it as Forster recommends, because since it contains projects (some of them may take years to be completed), I sometimes add new entries (e.g., I have a new idea for an experiment).
If this is not backlog, then I should find a way to deal with it that is not what Forster recommends for backlogs.
what a day's work is for me
Honestly, I think it's close to impossible to figure out this one. For people working in an office environment, maybe this can be estimated by the orders they get from bosses (emails, calls, tasks assigned by others).
In my case, I do get occasionally emails that ask me to do things like admin or reviewing a paper/book chapter, etc… but the biggest source of new tasks is my own brain. I come up with ideas and just jot them down. It is very difficult to predict how long it'll take to test a particular hypothesis, or write a particular paper (it's always a lot more than initially predicted).
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.
So 'a day's work' is a tough one for me.
What if you produce more tasks that you can humanly action?
In my case, I know for a fact that I can produce more non-delegable tasks that I can humanly action. This will be my situation for a long time, unless I get really smart students that can take things from our discussion and completely develop the idea with little help. They are the exception, not the norm. And I think every academic I know will agree with that feeling (they produce more than they can complete). In a company, you probably can delegate things to others, but in the academia this is difficult, since there are only collaborators and students, and they are not paid to do the things that you cannot do (they have ideas of their own, sometime better than yours). That is they also produce more than they can complete
In other words, I agree with mouser that this situation is not addressed in GTD and DIT as it is described (unless I missed the point of both systems badly).
And combining and creating your own system takes a lot of time, effortm trial and error (as brownstudy said). What I find is that my current hybrid system may be a bad combination.
Recent Posts