To-Do List Essentials: How to Recruit Your Subconscious Mind
Time management expert Mark Forster’s Fast Final Version Plus will help you manage your task list to a tee.
The wonderful thing about technology is that it gives us the illusion we can do everything! So we try. And then…we get overwhelmed. And then we suffer severe cognitive decline, physical stress, and we start to pull our hair out. It may be a good way to save on barbershop visits, but it isn’t great for quality of life. (Except for our corporate overlords, who buy lapis lazuli yachts with the profits from our amazing productivity.)
What we can do, however, is manage the overwhelm so it becomes doable. You’ll have to pay for haircuts again, but it will be worth it.
For example, David Allen’s Getting Things Done system is a great way to manage stuff when it comes into your life. It turns into a bunch of task lists, though. For me, it quickly turns to chaos.
Fortunately, there’s a better way. Just keep one Long List of tasks, and have a good way to decide what to do next.
Use a “Long List” for All Your Tasks
My favorite system for managing a gazillion tasks was created by Mark Forster. I think he’s the best productivity mind I’ve ever encountered. I’ve been a follower of his systems since the Get-It-Done Guy began.
Mark has designed a dozen different systems for recording and doing tasks. He starts with a different attitude on task management. He scoffs at ranking things according to priority (and he’s British, so when he scoffs, it sounds great). Instead, he uses the psychology around the interplay between your conscious and unconscious minds to decide what to do next.
My favorite system of his is “Fast Final Version Perfected” or FFVP for short. Here’s how it works:
- Use one long list to record your tasks. I use a paper notebook. Paper engages all my senses in a way that works better than online lists.
- Put a dot by the first incomplete item in the list.
- Scan forward, considering tasks with a relaxed mental attitude.
- When you see an item that jumps out at you, put a dot by that item.
- Now, you have a choice: you can work on the item you just dotted, or keep going until another item stands out to dot.
- When you have worked on an item for as long as you want, mark it complete. If there’s still more to do on it, re-add it to the end of the list.
- Now work on the previous dotted item, or keep scanning forward from the one you just marked as complete and keep dotting.
- When you reach the end of the list, work on the last dotted item.
“Jumping Out” is Conscious and Unconscious
When you scan the list, just scan it with gentle attention. Don’t try to prioritize or analyze. Let your unconscious and conscious minds both consider the items you’ve written.
Mark believes both minds need to buy in to a task for you to be productive on it. That means even when we’re alone, we’re running things by committee. Isn’t that comforting?
When something jumps out, it may jump out for any reason. Maybe there’s a deadline coming up. Maybe it’s something that’s really important. Maybe it’s something that you just want to do. But when it jumps out, that means your unconscious mind is ready to let you work on it.
Because your task list has a mix of items from everything you’re working on, you are implicitly balancing all your projects against each other, and allowing your unconscious mind to prioritize them.
Depending on the size of your tasks, you’ll end up with a few large items dotted, or several smaller ones. Keep each set of dotted tasks to a length that’s short enough to finish in a couple of hours. You can (and will!) always dot more tasks.
Work As Much As You Want
When you’re working on a task, you don’t have to complete it in one sitting. Work “little and often.” Just re-enter a task at the end of the list if there’s more to do. You’ll get to it when you keep scanning forward.
Once you reach the end of the list, you go back to the previous dotted task. And when you’re done with that, you either go forward or back to the dotted task before that. So unless you decide to go forward again after working on a task, you can think of this technique as scanning forward through the list dotting tasks, and then working on the task in the reverse order you dotted them.
Reprioritize by Rewriting
If something new comes up that’s really urgent, just add it to the end of the list. Then when you’re dotting tasks, scan forward, dot that task, and work on it.
That’s also how you move something at the start of the list to be higher priority. Cross it out and re-add it to the end of the list. Now it’s available on the current pass of dotting tasks forward.
Don’t abuse this, however. The system works mainly when you’re following the rules.
Use a Someday / Maybe List
One thing’s worth mentioning: this is not a “master list” that I talked about in episode 171.With a master list, you record everything you think of. With Mark Forster’s “long list,” you record only the things you actually intend to do. Otherwise all the “maybe someday” items end up clogging the list.
When you have something you don’t want in the active mix of what you’re doing now, do one of three things:
- Add it to a “someday/maybe” list. Somewhere on your long list, put an item “review my someday/maybe list.” When you eventually dot that item, review the someday/maybe list and if anything seems worth doing now, transfer it to your long list. Or…
- Schedule a specific time and date on your calendar when you’ll do that thing. Then forget about it until then.
- Schedule a future email or reminder to reconsider the item and set an alarm for a specific time and date. At that point, you decide whether to add it to your long list, delete the reminder, or schedule taking action.
Be Disciplined in Your Approach
In order for any system to work, you have to use the system for long enough to get into a groove. That means, always scan your list from the start and respect your dots. If you enter an urgent item at the end, still scan from the most recent dotted item up to the urgent item before dotting and doing it.
Also, don’t overload it by starting with 100 items. Start with a few items and add them organically. If you have important stuff on your old list that you’re afraid may get lost, on your Long List, add an item: “review old task list and transfer over 3 items to the new one.”
Then you can reintroduce items from your old list at a pace you can handle.
Dealing with a to-do list that covers much of your life is easy when you make a Long List and a Someday/Maybe list. Just put everything you genuinely intend to do on your Long List, and use the Fast Final Version Perfected system by Mark Forster to go through the list, integrating your conscious and unconscious decision-making.
I’m Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. If you want to take action to change your life, check out my “Get-it-Done Groups” accountability groups at SteverRobbins. Image of to-do list © Shutterstock.
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
