Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management | Mark Forster

Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management | Mark Forster | It's about productivity, not procrastination!

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Do It Tomorrow and...

	Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management Mark Forster Hodder & Stoughton, 2008 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Aimed at those who have trouble completing assignments on time as well as anyone looking to lead a well-organized life, this innovative handbook takes a unique approach to time management. Efficiency expert Mark Forster shows that prioritizing tasks is never a sufficient approach to organizing a schedule, and is rarely even helpful. In the place of prioritization he posits several radical new ideas, including closed lists, the manyana principle, and the ?will do? list. Innovative forms of communication that are designed to produce effective conversation and planning are also provided. The result is a complete system which will boost efficiency and simultaneously decrease stress and overworking.

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Best Time Management Book Ever

Mark's book is amazing, and following his principles has changed my life. He gives concrete ways to work -with- our natural resistance to whatever we might need to do.

For example, most of us use to-do lists. Mark recommends closed lists. Instead of our to-do list being a never-ending story - you finish what you're doing.

His method of dealing with backlog is killer. No - it doesn't involve throwing it out or ignoring it. Instead it makes the backlog entirely managable. Imagine coming back from a month long vacation and being relaxed about what you need to do?

A lot of people like David Allen's "Getting Things Done" and I do too. But even David needs to be listening to Mark. Want proof? After he wrote Getting Things Done, he put out his newsletter VERY sporadically and always apologized for it. I'm sure he now has systems and people in place now to get the newsletter out the door - but if his system worked - he'd have it together. He didn't.

The two books together are a good combination, but "Do It Tomorrow" definitely comes first - by far.

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It's about productivity, not procrastination!

"Do It Tomorrow"

Although I don't like the title of the book at first glance because of the tendency to think that procrastination is occurring, the depth of the book and the usefulness of it make it one book that I will never loan out.

This book is about the combination of skills including drawing a line in the sand with backlog work and creating what's called a "closed" list of daily work. The unique benefit of creating a closed list is that you truly learn what you are capable of doing within one day. This, of course, helps you determine when and if you should hire an assistant and what work you can possibly delegate to them to increase your own productivity.

When I use the principles from this book combined with the classification of work as described by D. Allen in Getting Things Done ("at computer", "phone", "waiting for", etc.), I'm actually getting more things done with less stress!

I wrote the author when he first started teaching these skills in seminars over in the U.K. a year or two ago. Unable to travel to the UK, I kept sending an occasional letter asking for a book. I'm glad I waited for two reasons:

1. The material is unique in many ways. It is because of flipping something on its head that allows me to enjoy some INCREDIBLY productive days that leave me filled with energy about accomplishment knowing I did the best I could possibly do with my time.
2. The material is something I can use to teach my employees how to better manage their time in an office that doesn't always have the ability to work completely off a closed list, due to emergencies and procedure/process execution.

I'm still working out some kinks, but have found his online blog help very useful for answering questions related to the book.

This book is 5 star on useful information!

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An absolutely terrific little book

1st edition (2006), 203 pages

Do It Tomorrow is only the fourth useful book on time management that I've come across (the other three are The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch, The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker and The Management of Time by James T Mackay - the last two of which were published decades ago).

Most standard time management dogma seems to involve advice about how to cram ever more of what you are currently doing into your day. I have been deeply suspicious of this approach for a long time now. It never worked for me and I've not seen it working for other people either.

I'll quote a paragraph from the beginning of chapter four (`The Problem with Time Management') which gives a good flavour of Forster's style and approach to his subject:

"The two things I want to examine are the concept of prioritising by importance and the frequently used tool of making a to-do list. Both of these tend to be the sacred cows of time management, and I believe both of them are fundamentally wrong. The reason is the same in both cases: they tend to make us do more of what gave us the problem in the first place."

It is a great shame that it is so rare for an author to pay close attention to the evidence, even if it leads to conclusions totally opposite to conventional wisdom on the subject. Mark Forster is one of those authors and I strongly advise reading his terrific little book - you won't be disappointed.

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Brilliantly simple! Simply brilliant!

I have been following the precepts laid down in this book for the last three weeks. By adopting Forster's methods, I have seen my productivity soar 30-40%. By accomplishing more, I am experiencing a qualitative improvement in feelings of well-being and contentment.

There is no magic to improved productivity. You have to do the work. No system will do the work for you. But there are experimentally validated, proven tricks for getting oneself motivated to do things instead of procrastinate. Forster is a master of these tricks and he lays them out in clear, simple language in his book.

The key insights are almost laughably simple. So simple, it's all too easy to reject them as childishly simplistic. But they work if you give them a try. And if you have substantial, difficult, and complex goals that still remain to be accomplished, you owe it to yourself to give Forster's method a test.

The fundamental fact of human nature that underlies Forster's system is that we crave completion. Forster criticizes conventional to-do lists because we can add new items to them throughout the day, impeding us from ever completing them. Forster's solution is to create a list of items to do tomorrow, and then draw a line under those items. If you complete everything above the line, you've succeeded.

Of course you never know exactly what will come up tomorrow. Things are going to demand your immediate attention and you will have to do them as well. But those new things are things you add below the line of the list you made up yesterday. As much as possible, you try to avoid doing today incoming new tasks that came in today. Your goal is to complete today all the items that you wrote down yesterday for today.

You can't imagine how powerful a motivator it is to complete today's list until you try it. The mind does crave completion. If it's getting near the end of the day and I still have a few items remaining on my list, I will move heaven and earth to get them completed. If there are still two hours left in the day and I am almost done with my list, I will complete those items. Then I will spend those two hours doing whatever I want. Maybe I'll do some more work. Or maybe I'll goof off. If I choose to goof off I will do so totally guilt-free. I know that I've done what I've set out to do and I know that I deserve the time off.

I've been following David Allen's Getting Things Done system for more than five years. I have found that adding Mark Forster's list-making system to Getting Things Done has been a boon to my productivity.

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More practical than GTD, but not as paradigm-shifting

I recommend reading Getting Things Done by David Allen before reading this book. A lot of the approaches and philosophies of this book are addressed in a more eye-opening way in GTD. However, GTD is an impractical system for most people, and hard to implement long-term. Do It Tomorrow is a very useful system that thrives on simplicity, which is what I love.

The gist of this system is that everything assigned to you today, you do tomorrow. Even stuff like answering e-mail, returning voice mail, and simple tasks. Close your to-do list for today, work only on that today, and let the new tasks you accumulate be added to tomorrows to-do list (which then is immediately closed when you begin work the next day).

The book proceeds to clarify exactly how one might implement this system. I thought most of it was great and really insightful, I just had a few minor quibbles.

First, I thought the book was too long. At a couple hundred pages, it's not ludicrous in length. But describing such a simple system shouldn't take so long. A lot of the quizzes bogged down the pace, and there was a chapter or two that felt unnecessary and redundant (perhaps that's because I'm a veteran of GTD, though).

Next, the author fleshes out some details in great depth, but glosses over what seem to be good points. How do we make sure that there's nothing we're accidentally leaving off of our to-do list (excuse me, our "will-do list" which is the author's renaming of the tool)?

But with common sense and experience with other key productivity principles, this system is a great breath of fresh air of simplicity. It's creative and the basis of how I plan my days now. So far (a few weeks), so good. Pretty effective.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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