Do It Tomorrow: The Principles

I'm reading through the book Do It Tomorrow by Mark Forster ...

From Chapter 2, "The Principles"...

One thing at a time...
I am so much more successful at doing one thing at a time instead of pseudo-multi-tasking. (Multi-tasking is a myth, by the way. We should really be thinking about it as switchtasking.) I get so much more satisfaction by concentrating on a task and seeing it through to completion, putting other tasks aside unless they are genuine "drop everything else" emergencies.

Little and often...
Driving hard on a big task or project all at once goes contrary to how most of our brains work. When we do this, we quickly get tired, frustrated, and cranky. Our brains typically need times of rest to assimilate information, make connections, and gain new insights as we go. I need to focus more to break up tasks and projects into much smaller tasks and work through them a little at a time every day.

Define your limits...
When I say "yes" to everything without any qualifications, I feel that I end up performing rather haphazardly and half-hearted toward those commitments. My creativity and sense of satisfaction also seems to suffer much. Our creativity expresses itself best when we have limits defined. Limits keep us from getting scatter-brained. We can also focus on doing our best work when we have a narrowly defined set of commitments.

Closed lists...
This is the most significant principle that I've ever heard in my almost-20 years of studying time management methodologies. It's so simple, yet so profound: I get so much more satisfaction by getting through a pre-set list of tasks each day vs. getting through a relatively small set of tasks when compared to an ever-growing endless list of to-do items. The concept of the traditional open-ended to-do list must be abolished! Draw a line, take back your life! (More about this in a future post.)