The more I think about it and the more experience I get, the more I realise that the key to good time management is how one handles resistance. I don’t mean resistance by other people to our brilliant ideas. I mean the resistance we have ourselves to what we know we should be doing. Imagine for a second what it would be like if you had no resistance to any of your work. Wouldn’t you just sail through it, getting everything done when it should be done without any reluctance or struggle to get going or keep going. Everything in your life would be beautifully ordered and you’d be able to look bac ..read more

Following up from my post yesterday, here is a simple system to make resistance a positive in your work and activities instead of the negative that it is for most people. 1. Write out a list of the things you have to do. You can build the list up gradually, but the aim is to eventually cover everything in your life that doesn’t happen on a set-time basis. You can add further tasks at any time. 2. Starting at the end of the list, scan back through the list dotting every task which you feel zero resistance to doing.  3. Starting from the end, take at least some action on every task you’ve d ..read more

Wednesday, June 15, 2022 at 9:00 is based on using scanning to reduce resistance. Many other time management systems use scanning a list to select what to do next. How do they compare for the purpose of lowering resistance? I must give it a proper name - suggestions? The whole list is scanned in one go, which allows for one’s mind to do a mini-assessment of every task on the list. This allows for all factors to be taken account of, and also allows the mind to advance each task in readiness. Both these systems use scanning to compare tasks in order to create a “resistance ladder”. After a compl ..read more

In Part 2 I said that I would deal with how NQ-FVP can be used as a long list, a short list and a no-list system, all at the same time. In fact this is very simple because the system naturally suits itself to isolating a group of tasks at the end of the list where they can be dotted and re-dotted as much as is required. To do this, decide which tasks on your NQ-FVP list you want to be in your short list or no-list, dot them and move them to the end of the NQ-FVP list by the usual method of doing and re-entering them. Alternatively you can move them by reprioritising your list. This is done by ..read more

The two main problems with NQ-FVP are 1) it tends to be rather inflexible, and 2) it concentrates too much on the end of the list where the new and re-entered tasks congregate, to the exclusion of the beginning of the list where the older and unstarted tasks congregate. I am experimenting with a couple of small changes to which improve both these aspects. These are: 1) When you’ve done a task (and re-entered it if necessary) you can go directly to the previous dotted task if you wish, without having to scan to the end of the list. 2) You are limited to two dotted tasks per scan. This does not ..read more

At the beginning of Day 4 of testing I have 82 undone tasks in the system (including writing this post). I have the following page stats (I’m using three columns on a page of 33 lines): Page 1 Completed 99 Remaining 0 Page 2 Completed 99 Remaining 0 Page 3 Completed 66 Remaining 33 Page 4 Completed  3  Remaining 50 267 tasks completed in three days equals an average of 89 tasks a day. This means that I’ve got about a day’s worth of undone tasks in the system. This is about the limit that a random method can take without undue delays.  ..read more

I’ve had to withdraw from the Lenten Challenge, not because the system I was using didn’t work, but because I got the idea for a new system and wanted to try it out.  I’m not going to tell you any more about it because I don’t want to distract anyone from the Challenge. Enough to say that it’s a No List variant, and requires the ability to count up to ten (which, looking at the deletions on my list, I apparently don’t have ..read more

I’ve said several times on this blog and in the comments that the system that I keep coming back to is NQ-FVP. The name NQ-FVP is derived from the Final Version (FV), through the Final Version Perfected (FVP), and finally  the NQ bit which stands for “No Question”. NQ-FVP is a clumsy name for sure, but it does reflect how the system was developed, and anyway there are plenty of acronyms flying around which hardly anyone knows what they stand for, e.g. Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd) or CAPTCHA ( Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). So NQ-FVP it’s ..read more

I’ve just realised that I never gave a final progress report on the proposed new rules for Autofocus 1. In spite of the fact that I got a considerable amount of work done in the few days I ran the trial, I came to the conclusion that the new rules didn’t in fact contribute much. I came across much the same benefits and problems as I normally do with Autofocus, which are that the list tends to expand excessively with the result that eventually the size of the list becomes oppressive and it’s difficult to deal with urgent or time-sensitive matters within the system. I’ve now decided to go back t ..read more

At the end of the day the stats are: Page 1: 33 done, 0 remaining Page 2: 33 done, 0 remaining Page 3: 22 done, 11 remaining Page 4: 13 done, 20 remaining Page 5: 5 done, 28 remaining Page 6: 4 done, 23 remaining That’s in a bit less than two days. It seems to be progressing satisfactorily. I’m particularly pleased that the number of tasks remaining seems to be static, and also that the 5-4-3-2-1 method has not once failed me. I’ve been thinking up some other ways of using 5-4-3-2-1 which I want to try out. So I’m going to leave the Halving system for the time being and do some more experiment ..read more