Transcript for:
Reflections on Mark Forster's *Do It Tomorrow*

so I've got this random quote which I quite like a quote from Mark Forster to complain about a shortage of time is like efficiency complaining that it has a shortage of water what would you connect that to David is it a major theme of the book do it tomorrow it's a way of handling the internal complaints I mean I've I'm 50 years old and it took me half a century to finally realize uh that it's not that I have a shortage of time I'm just over committed uh in my life that's that's why it feels that way so yeah the the book that Mark wrote is a way of handling that that's that's kind of lovely I love it's very elegant how he how he handles that reality that a lot of people experience so I read this book once upon a time a couple years back and I recently reread it how many times have you read this specific book David I think it's maybe half a dozen times and now this one uh probably four times I guess I read it was enamored by it went back and reread it immediately and outlined it and highlighted it and um I think I've read it one time since and then I read it again for for getting ready for this the what I've gathered from this book and what I've gleaned from it I've reduced to a couple of simple points I think David has really internalized a lot of this and will give you a little bit more of a deeper view than myself um I just look for an opportunity of how I can adapt certain principles to my timeline system and and how it applies to to me so we're going to get into that but um so David give me give us an intro for the book as a whole I think you do a much better job than myself yeah so uh when I first read the book it's short I I've read probably about 50 to 100 productivity and personal management books this one sounded interesting it was uh do it tomorrow and what was the other uh several other productivity uh secrets and uh so I I read it and there was this one particular quote I'll I'll share my screen I'll steal the screen share and uh share that this quote right here really captured my attention uh he said I tried to get away from the whole concept of managing time and instead looked at how we can get our goals to pull us towards them and that that concept really captured my attention and it really aligned with how I look at my Life After 50 years um you know the first 30 or 40 years I thought I could push hard enough to finally do all the things I wanted to do in the you know from 30 to 40 45 I felt depressed by the fact that I I wasn't going to be able to do that and for the last five years I've really been reorienting myself to what's really important to me I've got a limited time here on Earth and I want to use it well I'm not going to be able to do a lot of the stuff I want to do um so trying to really get clarity on my goals and finding the goals that really pull me so when I read that that was a pretty that was a pretty fascinating concept um Mark Forrester wrote the book The thing that I found interesting about the book and the overall concept is to break it down into a few simple bullet points uh is take all the things that you have on your to-do list isolate those things and push them to tomorrow just take collapse the whole thing and push it to tomorrow you'll deal with it tomorrow literally if you're going to implement the system that's what you would do today is take all of your to-do things and move it to tomorrow you'll deal with that and then today what you're going to do is figure out uh what is what are the things that I'm committed to doing today and that's all that gets on there so once you make your list for today make sure you get alignment with your boss or your wife or your spouse to make sure that what's on there uh is things that meet both your needs and the needs of those that are stakeholders in your life so any any extra incoming stuff during the course of today gets pushed to tomorrow as far as possible yes you you immediately push it to tomorrow unless it's triaged and then tomorrow as you're planning your day tomorrow you decide what am I going to do and everything else gets pushed to the Future so you close the things you're going to do today so unless it's an emergency you don't do it today or when you make your plan for tomorrow you don't you don't do anything but the things you planned on doing that's that's the the overarching concept and then the whole book is exploring how do you set the stage where that's feasible um and how do you Orient your life so that things don't keep on intruding and so it's really an exploration of that's a pretty fascinating book there's a lot of little nuggets nuggets that are really valuable and then all of the books I've read there were things that he was presenting that I've never read before so there's all these really cool little nuggets about how to think about commitments and prioritization and closing and opening lists and what that means that are are pretty cool um so the the do it tomorrow really centrally thinks about how to close a list and what's the difference between a closed list and an open list and then he deploys it into how you make your daily plan and you've done that Frank you've kind of deployed that system into your timeline how have you done that well just a quick thought there as you're speaking um that's what occurred to me that this is there's quite an overlap with kanban right um one of the core principles of limiting your work in progress so in order to limit your work in progress now if you've got a couple of typical kanban stages to do doing Etc um you're going to want to push them somewhere the incoming stuff to not have it bug you down right now and so that you can keep focused and limit your work in progress um and do the most important stuff right now you're going to push whatever it is to some stage or somewhere else and that's somewhere else I think Mark Foster is pinpointing as at least from Tomorrow onwards but it's not going to make it onto your closed list if it's not an emergency all right um what's interesting that's that's kind of a classic uh agile principle is limiting your work in progress kanban has a particular way of doing that similarly Sprint uh with scrums you with scrum you you close what you're going to do with your Sprint and and scrum has this elaborate way of how you do that with story points and everything but it's that same concept how to how to close a list and isolate it so that you know what you're planning on doing right that's a big deal how long have you been implementing the system for David or at least um the dynamic of doing it tomorrow and keeping a closed list uh I think I started now I've deployed my own unique spin on it it's called The closed backlog and I'll show that here in a little bit right doing that I think I read the book first probably about four years ago it was before covet so it was at least like 2018 2019 and I'm on my 10th close backlog which has been a wonderful contribution to My Life um just that idea of closing a list you know if it got me onto this book was Bob Elliot um it seemed to be one of his favorites and he mentioned it quite a bit and I eventually read it and so Bob you have had an influence unbeknown to Bob he has an influence in big and small ways and I I am doing now doing more stuff tomorrow I'm pushing stuff through to tomorrow um let me share my screen here and we'll get into a couple of things that I do some simple Dynamics all right are you seeing it yeah okay great so I've done the random quote you did a good job there of tying that into some specifics now let's take a look my closed list I've got a quote there that I quite enjoyed a closed list is a way of applying limits to our work in order to increase our efficiency basically limit our work in progress as you focus on the most important stuff and the way my closed list plays out is what I call my daily planner and several of you if you've watched uh the workflow week timeline webinar a couple of weeks back if you've ever seen my material you know that I have a timeline system let me jump to my home page here and basically what that consists of is let me zoom out a little let me open up my left bar here it basically is a set of time blocks that I have and I've organized all my stuff and it's nice and pretty and laid out for tomorrow and we can take a look at that but basically my time blocks flow into my particular file or my calendar I've got a bit of a vacation coming up to a beach called ikapowi that's nice and visible Okay so let me close that you will see that right now 10 pm my time in northeast of Brazil let me just collapse that what I have going on tomorrow this is what I've planned intentionally I've sculpted it to have certain things at certain time blocks and that's as much as I'm going to say about that right now um and that's my I want to as far as possible um not have anything polluting this set of tasks that I have so I can actually focus on these I've got some important things uh up tomorrow I've got a coaching session at 9am my time before that I'm gonna get an hour of writing in on the book The WorkFlowy timeline I've got a couple more slots throughout the day wherever you see uh where I've covered the color these time slots in blue that's where I'm going to be writing so I've got at least five hours planned for tomorrow so if I had to have random things coming in um all kinds of emails uh chat what not being distracted by social media not going to get done what I plan to get done tomorrow and so as far as possible this is a closed ecosystem it's a closed list and that's really as simple as it gets it's just my daily planner for tomorrow um and then how about stuff that is yeah how often just a reality check for me how often when you look at that list for tomorrow is that something that you uh utilize with 100 Effectiveness uh how often does it get changed scrapped moved around either because of external or internal shifts in motivation or or needs is that but is that something you pretty much hit your stride on first of all let me let me clarify here this is for tomorrow but um basically let's just say that we're already living in tomorrow because today it's the end of the day I'm doing this webinar at the end of the day um basically this is the day I'm going to be living tomorrow so as I go about my day tomorrow imagine that today is the 6th of July um and this is today so this list is basically my today list my closed list and I think that's what you're asking about how successful I might be in completing um the majority or if not all of these items um from Tomorrow the place that I'm going to push things into the incoming tasks um that I don't want to be distracted by if they're not emergencies I'm going to push them into my calendar which I'm going to give you a quick uh show and tell off now um but to go back to your question there um is that what you're asking David whether uh how much I have to reshape what I'm doing yeah day to day does it do you typically kind of hit that 100 of the time or 95 percent of the time or or how often does once you you know it uh I think it was a general in the military said uh that a plan is only I can't remember how he put it but a plan as soon as it hits the enemy just gets scrapped planning's important but the plan itself uh is something that doesn't survive contact with the Enemy uh so when you hit your day tomorrow will you look back and that's what you've done pretty much 100 of the time unless there's an emergency or or does that tend to shift around because of it it does and that it does get it does shift around and that's why I love the ability to move things around so these these items in yellow over here are fixed they're going to stay put I have meetings there um and the other stuff is a little bit more flexible I try to create a bit of buffer um space to play around with so I can move things around I think I sometimes overestimate how much how many hours I can write in a day I'm overly optimistic but I'm getting better at this and uh creating backup slots and not being overly optimistic in in how many hours I can write a day but basically what I'm I'm doing between the fixed um events let's say this coaching session over here another WorkFlowy team meeting there's two of them tomorrow around those fixed events I will get to be flexible I've got an evening out with my wife tomorrow that's a couple of hours out so it's it's more relaxed from the afternoon out if it wasn't uh date night I'd get more time to write so the landscape shifts from day to day um Thursday is a lot more flexible to answer your question probably um well everything necessary gets done and I have to take advantage of uh for My we're going to talk about current initiatives the one thing that you're focusing on and that's the workflow timeline book for me which will be out on the 28th of July but um I'm pretty I'm getting better at it not 100 I'd say about 75 to 80 percent of the things I plan get done not so much the the things but how much time I spend on each thing and I'm learning how to squeeze more out of my day um that's that's the journey I'm on I think as all of us are um so let me jump to um back to where I was there [Music] so there's a couple of things I do to push things away and that place that's away is going to be to tomorrow and tomorrow happens to be tonight two days from now so I hope that's not confusing tomorrow let's say I'm living the timeline that I've just showed you those time blocks and what I will do I've got a couple of things here but let me just go through a quote or two uh Mark Forster I love it where he he distills it into um this one imperative your default setting should be do it tomorrow it's not everything that you've got planned for today you're going to do tomorrow it's anything extra that comes in that you haven't planned for today and we're going to look at a couple of examples and I'm going to love a couple of tasks that um David hasn't seen at him and vice versa and we're going to see what the other does with those incoming tasks and events um and then the other thing over here this other quote one of the great secrets of time management is not to give things more urgency than they deserve never react to anything immediately unless it is a genuine emergency so that's the journey I'm on to I'm learning to not see things as more urgent as they are for the sake of focusing on the things that I've planned the night before and just doing them so a couple of ways that that plays out is um my calendar let me jump back let me jump to my my calendar tomorrow's Buckley my cat do you have a task you want to lob at me anything off the top of your head sure yeah I'm curious to know how you actually handle this is a task I know that you've at least been working on uh you if you suddenly decide that you want to get a better uh webcam and some lighting and a new mic and kind of set up your office uh to do uh webinars I've been curious how when you are struck by that desire or that need and it's several tasks that involved in getting uh the project done of kind of getting your setup ready to go for for doing webinars and and videos uh where does that go does that uh so that's that's a new incoming thing right yeah let me just create um let's say I'm in some random place it doesn't really matter where um and you say new equipment like a webcam and that might be a whole project so let's say webinar equipment and my first go-to is I've gotten into emojis recently so I'm going to look for a microphone I'm going to give it a nice pretty emoji and where am I going to put this am I going to blow half an hour maybe an hour looking into this uh uh researching on Amazon or elsewhere to see what different webcams and what other options I do have uh that might suck me down a rabbit hole so webinar equipment one of the first things on my mind would be maybe a better webcam as you can all see I'm a little bit washed out there I don't know if it has to do with um my exposure settings I could probably fix that if I put some effort into that so maybe another thing I should do is just uh play with exposure settings and I don't want this to derail me now let's say I'm busy I have a meeting up next so I'm not going to be able to look at it anyways but um where would I put that I'm gonna pop that into let me open up my left bar and tomorrow is quite well tomorrow is the thing that you're looking at right now so let me not get confused and trip over that um Saturday that might be a good day I'm free on Saturday morning got plenty of time I'm gonna put it into my other uh outline whoops let me just jump back there I'm going to drag and drop this directly into my left bar into a subcategory of Saturday let me just jump into Saturday so you see where it is what am I going to do with that Friday night when that's tomorrow night no two nights from now um I'm gonna take a look at what I have so Friday night imagine this is Friday night I'm going to take a look at all the things I have in this date bucket in my calendar and I'm going to process them into my time blocks for the next day and I'll figure out I'll probably set aside uh 30 minutes maybe to take a look online and see if there's some better options than the the webcam that I have right now I'll just give that 30 minutes all right um and that's what I'll do no matter where I am I could be deep in a project um let me just see where might I want to jump to let me jump to my my calendar I could be some really random Place far far away and it's maybe the 11th of June I'm busy looking at something and the idea suddenly strikes me that have you got another task for me David uh you're you're if your wife tells you she really needs uh some time to to go on a date with you how do you process that oh that's that's planned already but um if you have that plan okay yeah if she wants to double it up and have a Thursday and Friday I'm I'm game um date night two now it's not going to be we'll see this is interesting tomorrow I already have a date night planned and uh let me go ahead and give this a romantic Emoji maybe a heart and um I'm gonna push that to Friday in my calendar so let me just see what I have there Friday night other it doesn't have a specific time I need to think about it um and see when that might be still planet with my wife and that tucks away there anything else you got you could threat me well what do you do with uh if if you're driving down the road and uh and you see somebody that has a flat tire you know just kind of a you have to make a decision whether to help somebody how do you process that all right so first thing that pops into my mind is I'm going to try to be a Good Samaritan and if it's safe enough I'm gonna stop and uh help them change the tire which is something I actually do know how to do so more hands uh what's what's the Confucius saying um many hands make light work exactly many hands make light works uh I'll stop and just do that I wouldn't put it into any list there's some things that you're just gonna do um all right you've got another one for me last one I'm gonna go in I'm gonna actually ask uh Trevor asked is the WorkFlowy timeline the only calendar you keep said I use a calendly I use calendly because that's how people book my time not sure how I would successfully manage two calendars How uh how do you uh is do you have multiple calendars you deal with that dump into the time yeah what happens this is my workflow so um I don't know if you can see my whole screen let me just jump to uh calendly do you see that loading yeah okay and so you can see the scheduled events um the upcoming items I got quite a few things in calendly for the upcoming days and weeks right that's that's for the coaching um and if you had to take a look at my is closed out at my Google Calendar it's all there so if I jump to my calendar um and I'm going to filter for you're going to see where it is on my timeline and then I'll answer the question directly there so I'm going to search for um within this calendar I'm going to search for the Target emoji and it's going to reveal in my calendar where these coaching sessions are spread out um over the next month or two and yes these items calendly would would schedule them directly automatically into Google Calendar and I would just uh bring over the information I feel this is something I'm going to write about that I am writing about for the WorkFlowy timeline book um for the sake of having a source of Truth and depending on how much effort it takes to get from stuff that is that goes into say Google Calendar or you get an email with a calendar notification saying that so and so has booked a 30 or a one hour session on such and such date I would just set aside every now and then maybe 30 minutes to manually grab the information that I need and put it into workflow with the other great thing is that within each of these and I do that for many reasons which I'm going to outline and it's it's worth the manual fiddling to get it in because first of all I'm going to have notes pertaining to each each of the um coaching clients within that outline I also have the link which I can click on which will take me to the Google meet uh chat room and any other information resources uh will belong we'll go into there and and I do this for the sake of having pretty much all of my stuff events projects everything um on my workflow timeline so I don't have to go and look at other places and so I find that this is a reasonable thing to do is so basically do you use other calendars as kind of an inbox I mean obviously if you look at my Google Calendar actually um I only have I've actually don't look at it um and that's something I'm going to delve into and how you can I don't advocate for only using workflowing I mean some people do need to use Google Calendar if they're collaborating with others and um Apple calendar and all the other things and Outlook so um it's just my particular um the thing that I do is I like to get everything if it's reasonable to put it into my calendar I'll put it there so um what else did I want to say about doing it tomorrow so you've you've given me a couple of tasks and I managed to fend them off and not focus on them right now um by pushing them through to tomorrow or someplace in my timeline so it doesn't only have to get uh pushed through to tomorrow end up in an inbox and then at the end of the day try to sift through it and sort it and then decide where it goes what I do is typically I'll decide at the moment at the drop of a hat where it belongs if there's a good date for it or a good time I'll put it somewhere that makes sense in my calendar um so that's what I do another thing is if you had something I wanted to mention if you had um said to me something like one of these little tasks like I I've got three or four emails incoming emails I Got a notification for it okay nothing interesting I would just dismiss them and I would end up doing something that is incoming let's say we're living tomorrow we're living these things um that you're seeing now that I'm scrolling through um I'm not going to put it off tomorrow I've got a Time on my uh my my my planner over here where I've got this midday Sprint for a period of three hours I've batched several things so one of them is a batch of uh finances to look at uh to get on top of um if I have email I might spend about 10 minutes on that uh it just depends how much I have in my inbox and then I'll adjust this maybe after I've done a promotion or something I've got quite a few more emails and so I might bump that up to 30 minutes and then I'll try and fit all the admin as much as I can into this midday Sprint and the reason I do this is to try and not make it feel as if I have got too much going on tomorrow so I can batch certain things whether it's email incoming messages um and other things like having lunch during that period of the day as well um just random things and I like to squeeze them into a three hour period and so if you had if you loved it me some simple admin task um to do with finances if I was if it was before um midday I would just batch it and at that time I would do it if it was after midday or maybe four or five PM in the evening I would leave it for the next day so that's one of the things I do if I have some art Forester um bushes for um you know pushing things through tomorrow if it's not an emergency push it through to tomorrow but in my mind that's what I do with most things but in my mind I'll push it through to the next time that I have batched something so if I got a couple more emails that have come in or any admin that doesn't take that long I'm going to push it into my midday Sprint and I'll just do it on the same day because um let's say it's it's 10 o'clock in the morning I get something incoming I'll just pop it into 12 o'clock because it might be an ideal thing to do during that three hour period right so that's that's what I do that's one exception another interesting thing is I wanted to look um this might be an interesting tip for those who are on mobile or if workflow is taking too long to load on your mobile what I do is the following um let me jump to my calendar uh once again and this is say if I scroll down to the next day at the end of the next day up let's just zoom into there so it makes a little bit more sense if I zoom into Friday and I got several things that are going to play out on Friday right at the bottom I've got what I call my Mobile inbox and the reason that's there is because anything that I enter into my mobile through this shortcut that I've got and I'm just going to describe how I how I do that is let's jump into there um I'm going to take my this if let me just zoom out again you'll see that this is a shared list I'm going to zoom in a little bit more you can see this has got a Blue Halo which means that it's a shared list and what I've done is I've shared this list and I've created a shortcut on my Android on my home screen which will take me to this specific shared list in my browser so in in Chrome and what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to open up the shortcut my mobile inbox let's zoom in here I'm just gonna tap something in on my phone let's say um and Frank is this mobile inbox on a different account than your main account just a second um investigate the auto investigate um something frivolous like must uh mustache styles the next season of Cobra Kai I quite enjoyed that series it just occurred to me like is there another season five or six is there something that I'm like missing and that's not important I'm just going to pop into my mobile inbox and it'll stay there and I will process that I'm not gonna pollute my my daily planner with that today I'm going to try and push off everything that's frivolous or anything that's going to be a time sync for me now if there is something and that's just going to appear um let me zoom out to show you the context that's just going to be in my mobile inbox which I've input in my mobile it's going to show up on my desktop or even on mobile it's going to show up under um Friday the 7th which will be the day after tomorrow and what do I do if there's things that are a little bit more pressing so let's say my wife asks me to go to the pharmacy I need to I need to pick up and it's just it's on my way I can kill two birds with one stone I'm passing by so I'm the right person to do it I'll put it under today and as you can see today has a diamond and it's merged so where I've mirrored that to is I've murdered into a placeholder at the top of my daily planner and there it is it appears right there so these are a couple of items that I have in this placeholder that I don't quite know when specifically this year when I'm going to go to the pharmacy um it's going to need my attention pretty much immediately it might be pressing my daughter's guitar class the time for that shifts and changes so I'm going to have to schedule that for her because it's online and I don't have a specific time for that but in that placeholder I have uh today's node that's merged from my inbox all the other stuff in my inbox I don't want to see until a later time so it's not going to escape me at the end of uh tomorrow evening I'm gonna look at everything in the next day up on my calendar and I'm gonna take a look and process of the the stuff that's in my mobile inbox but the thing that will grab my attention is directly on mobile if it's a pressing thing I might put it under today and that'll be right at the top front and center of the items that I have planned for tomorrow can I ask a question yeah sure so today that that today no that's mirrored obviously would go into today uh and you showed the inbox on Friday do you just drop it to the next Friday like how do you decide where to place that inbox in order to address it all right I never pull this inbox out of my calendar so once I've processed it the night before so um this is for Friday so uh on on Thursday night that's tomorrow night I'm gonna come and uh process all of these I'm gonna drag and drop them all uh real quick rapid fire into my left bar in the time slots that just takes uh two to three minutes and then when I get to the mobile inbox I'm just going to take that and drag that down to the end of Saturday I I never want to bring this mobile inbox out into any other place other than the next day up on uh in my calendar so it's always going to be understood it's tomorrow that's where you have you have it and tomorrow it's yeah it's always going to be there under tomorrow um so that's just a workflow from getting stuff from my mobile inbox um into my system so that nothing falls through the cracks down all right um so I think that's all from my end David do you want to give us a show and tell of what you've got I'd like to hear about your uh your closed backlog and other little goodies that you're gonna walk us through uh yeah so Let's uh if you want to stop there we go stop sharing thank you um when I first read the book the thing that stuck with me and that's always what's most interesting to me personally is is what sticks with me not immediately and captures my attention but year after year what do I go back to and remember and one of the things that that Mark talks about in the book is sorting your life at the level of commitments he has a he has a quote here I'm going to go ahead and share my screen take a look at this quote here I said I want to make it clear here that I'm only unhappy about the concept of prioritizing one's tasks by importance prioritizing tasks is to be prioritizing at the wrong level that really was a fast when I read that I was super confused what does he mean that's wrong to prioritize tasks what could you possibly mean by that so the right place for prioritizing is at the level of goals and commitments it's very important to realize that work does not appear out of thin air it appears as a result of commitments that you have made every commitment results in work and every bit of work that you have have results from commitments whether you have made that commitment consciously or not and I talked about last week about um the or the last time we met the The Matrix From Desire commitments projects tasks uh and outcomes and how I'd created that to analyze um analyzed my life and try to help me make better decisions that idea of every task coming from commitments I got from Mark Forrester from this book and when I first read it I disagreed with him I thought no that's not true um and so I actually took the time to write down kind of everything that I do which sounds like a enormous task but there's really only about 30 to 50 things I do in a year you know once you include all the sleeping and eating and date nights and you know reading to the kids after about 30 I start to bog down realize there's about 30 to 50 things I do on average on a given year um you mean things that reoccur repeating stuff yeah yeah just the you know I I I sleep on the year I eat I take showers and I drive and I I paint houses and you know once it's it's not a lot of things that I end up doing so once I had made a list of all those things on my whiteboard over here and then tried to see is there a commitment associated with it and I realize yeah there absolutely is a commitment with every single thing that I do it all comes from some either internal or external commitment so that was pretty helpful to realize that I've got this enormous pile of tasks that uh that I'm constantly trying to sort through and and try and do the the most important things and he was he was talking about the fact that uh you can create good project management systems so that you can be more effective and I use GTD and that was really helpful as a way of sorting through things and that really helped me because before I had GTD it was I just was making these long lists and trying to sort through them and and GTD helped me do better at being efficient with all the incoming tasks but even after I've fully deployed GTD there was still too much and then I kind of Incorporated scrum and story points and and Sprint and work limiting work in progress and that did help you know that helped 10 or 20 percent in my life but still there was too many tasks so the the the best example that I have of reorienting my life completely at the level of commitments and I'm not talking about I'm so much being committed to a particular task but rather what are my overarching commitments I'm a husband that's a that's a area of responsibility I have I'm a dad I've got four kids and so inside of the those commitments are all of these things that I need to do to be a decent husband a decent father I'm you know I own property and have cars and computers so I have to manage my stuff and keep things running um and so I'm responsible for that the biggest change I've ever made other than getting married and having kids was I was a project manager and owned my own company project managing bath and kitchen remodels so 40 to 60 hours a week all the tasks that were coming at me came from that commitment of being a kitchen and bath remodeler and so when I woke up in the morning and made my to-do list the majority of the tasks on my to-do list came from that commitment in my career uh in 2020 I made the switch I cut off that commitment I decided specifically I'm no longer going to be doing projects like that I'm going to be a house painter and so the difference in my task list from 2018 and what would be on my task list on a given day and what's on my task list now is radically different it really rebalanced my life because I shifted my commitments and so that was really helpful for me to realize when I read this book about four years ago that was one of the things that really stuck with me is thinking through what are my commitments and when I feel out of balance and too busy and just run ragged not necessarily yes delete some tasks if I have tasks I don't really need to have on my to-do list get rid of those but if I'm still out of balance look up a few levels and see what commitments can I either delete or change or renegotiate the terms of so that my life can be more balanced where I made a mistake or it took me a while to understand was I was really mixing the concept of interest and commitment I have an enormous amount of Interest by which I mean I get super intensely interested in some topic for typically about three months that seems to be my cycle Jim Carr wish was my personal and business development coach for about a year and a half and he was one that pointed out I've got about a three-month cycle of super intense interest and I used to think that was a commitment that I would wake up super excited about the Iditarod dog sled race or or sailing or you know some New Concept I've read in a book it really helped me to understand that I need to understand this is an interest it's not a commitment and ask myself does this do I have time and space in my life to incorporate this interest and and actually make it a commitment where I'm allowing tasks to get on my to-do list so that was one sorting mechanism so quick question there David as far as figuring out your commitments um you wake up in the morning you lie in bed and then you start thinking of a couple of interests like uh sailing and your minds might go off and and think about how you might get into sailing again and everything that that involves um do you plot that in WorkFlowy or is it just simply making a a commitment to saying well it's it's not a current initiative it's not a commitment of mine right now um I cannot focus on that or is it something that you'll actually put into workflowing and then at least just give it the minimum of a thought a couple of lines and then say okay I'm gonna push this to tomorrow to to think about it later or does it not feature in WorkFlowy at all no it does go into WorkFlowy but it's I have some margin in my life from six to eight in the morning that's just my margin I don't I don't commit any tasks I don't do anything I it's just my thinking time development time whatever I feel like time so I've got that margin that's where I limited it to before it would have gone there it would have started creeping into my to-do list it would have displaced other tasks that I really needed to do in order to keep my commitments um so yeah I'll sit down from six in the morning after I get up and wake the kids up for school and I'm gracing I've been drinking coffee until six uh and I'll come up here to my office and whatever's on my mind if it's working on my novel if it's developing some new system if it's making a YouTube video about some idea I have about work flowy that's just kind of my free play time and so I really limited it to that space But I mostly do it in workflow just because that's how I operate so I'll plop down and start brainstorm and developing ideas and so when you when you've got this itch that you want to scratch but you recognize that it's not a commitment what will you do write down a couple of lines and then push it to some other times that it doesn't swallow up your your whole time Block in the morning so what I'll do is uh I'm gonna share my screen right here so I will play with it however I want to uh and and if it takes 15 minutes or the whole two hours or multiple days of those two hours I'll play with it as much as I want to where it goes is not over here on my task list which I use the timeline that you developed it doesn't end up there it comes over here in reference and if it's you know something to do with deciding I want to buy a catamaran and sale it and teach my kids and I play with that idea and develop whole a whole scheme of how I might do that in a few years and then I'll come over here to interests I'll drop it into interest under sailing and it'll be there to pick up if I ever you know return to that it won't get on my task list though unless it's a commitment that I decide to make right so you're popping things not only into tomorrow's time bucket but also into reference material someday stuff but you're getting it out of the way if it's not a commitment yeah yeah got it so that anyway that was really helpful for me to understand the difference between interests and commitments and also to understand that I need to balance my life at the level of commitments I want to jump into uh uh this thing that I've created that so you you use what Mark has created as far as just a classic kind of do it tomorrow you've implemented that system right I have not and probably will not I've I've spent about three decades trying to uh manage myself at the daily level and have not come up with a system that is accurate it reminds me when I think about all of the the hundreds of hours I've spent on trying to lock in and be like Frank uh when it comes to how you plan out your days that's really impressive to me I'm a Whitewater kayaker and uh so I've gone down a bunch of Whitewater rivers and some steep creeks and waterfalls and stuff and there was this one waterfall called Buster butt on the colosseja river in North Carolina and it was the biggest waterfall I'd done it was a 30-foot waterfall and uh and it was pretty intimidating and I'm pretty cautious and conservative and so uh but this was a waterfall I'd seen other people do and I really wanted to run it but it was a complicated waterfall to navigate with many obstacles as you went down this real real steep drop and uh so one day I sat there and the water was up really high and I thought I think I can do it and so I sat there and I was really nervous about running the waterfall and I remember sitting there on the side of the bank looking at the waterfall thinking there's no reason to be nervous if you don't feel super comfortable that you can do it then you're not going to do it but if you're super comfortable and you can do it then there's nothing to be stressed about because you know you can you can run it and so I finally decided and the way I did it was I I plotted out my paddle strokes and I thought okay I'm gonna here's how I'm gonna take the this wrap and I'm gonna Dodge this Rock by by dipping to the left and and so I really ran the waterfall in my mind over and over again to the point that I knew how I was going to run it it was precise and I was very accurate in how I was going to run it then I ran it and all hell broke loose to be honest as soon as I ran it the very first thing I did was wrong and I ended up running it backwards and upside down so that was how I ran that waterfall uh and uh and lived to tell the tale that's been for years I've tried to plan out my days but I've got so many weird internal and external motivations that constantly are tugging at me um that as soon as I make a plan uh and when I was asking you do you hit that with 100 or 80 accuracy uh as soon as I make a plan that's almost a sure way for me not to do it unless there's some kind of external uh uh motivation like I'm gonna get paid to finish a job or whatever so I don't do the do it tomorrow classically but when I first read the book and I understand closed backlogs um I want to share I want to share this uh the difference between a closed backlog and an open backlog it was super fascinating to me I'm going to go ahead and share my screen foreign so an open list in a closed list oh I haven't shared it yet sorry uh here we go there you see this yep okay so an open list which is what I've always used is just something you can keep on adding to and you can do some you can actually do some tasks from it and you can keep on adding things to the list so the the open list is defined by these characteristics new items can be added it tends to grow since new items can be added sequence and prioritization is important It's relatively difficult to clear because new things can continue to be added and it's super demotivating that was very fascinating and that kind of defined my to-do list up until the point that I read the book all of my to-do list uh were open lists um and it was very demotivating because I knew as soon as I had an idea of something I would want to do and put it into the list I wasn't confident it was going to get done or if my wife Gracie asked me to do something and I tossed it on the pile of thousands of other things I also wanted to do unless there was like catastrophe associated with not doing it like paying my taxes on time or something um it was unclear whether it was going to get done so when I read the book and he talked about the difference between an open list which I was very familiar with in a closed list it was very fascinating so he said in a closed list nothing new can be added it tends to get smaller the sequence does not matter It's relatively easy to clear and it's motivating so and he also talks about a closed list that the pro how you prioritize doesn't matter because it's a closed listen you're going to do everything it doesn't matter whether you do the easiest thing first or the funnest thing first or the most urgent thing or the most important thing they're all going to get done and you're going to complete the list so prioritization doesn't matter and he talks about with a closed with an open list prioritization is really important and when I read that that was that was really helpful for me to understand because I realized I have a way of prioritizing my list and it leads to the lifestyle that I live outside of the list so if I tend if you tend to always and only work on the most urgent things that's going to cultivate a certain lifestyle outside of the list if I'm only ever doing things that feel easy and those always pop up to the top of the list that's going to cultivate a completely different lifestyle if I'm always doing only the most important things that's a different lifestyle each of the ways of priority prioritizing your list changes how you actually live your life because as you keep on throwing things on the list that whatever you prioritize is always going to kind of Pop to the top so what I did uh is I created what I called a a closed backlog and I Define closed backlog very specifically so I'm on closed backlog number 10 right now and so essentially what I do is I've got over here in my references inside of each of these reference things which is broken down by my areas of responsibility family finances holidays home and property interlife interest service planning and review physical relationships and work so inside of their or I mean there's about 150 000 nodes inside of that reference file and a lot of those are potential tasks and projects I'm not committed to any of those particular things until I move it on to my timeline but the way I move things into my timeline is by putting it into a closed backlog and so my current closed backlog is uh it's just a set of things it's it's not it's not a commitment that I've made which would look like you know taking my wife on a date uh helping my kids with their homework as a as a dad work related stuff because I made commitments to do uh to do my work as a painter um so it's what am I going to work on that will improve my life or improve the life of people that I love um and so I sit down with my wife we go through all the possible things that I could be working on next and we select five to ten things uh that I want to work on then and I agree so Gracie I I do most of the work but then Gracie and I sit for like probably 15 minutes together and make sure that she has feedback on what's on there and then when I close the list nothing can get added nothing can get removed unless it's completed and then because I'm juvenile I always give myself a reward so right now sitting beside me is a 50 inch high def television I'm going to mount up on my wall um so I can cast from my computer to my wall when I'm having meetings but I don't put that on the wall until I close my backlog so I have a good question there do you have a certain number of items that you bring into your closed backlog or does this depend on how big the projects are it's more of a feeling to be honest it you know if I if I keep on adding too much stuff it feels like I'm never it starts to be demotivating because it's such an enormous list so it's really just an internal feeling I keep on adding and subtracting for about an hour and I kind of play around with it till it feels right and and then and it also depends on what am I going to give myself as a reward if it's something really enormous and motivating I can add more stuff if it's a cocktail I like making cocktails uh so I got a cocktail smoker that was one of them so I was kind of a small thing um and so the list was smaller so it's just it's like an internal feeling and and if I keep on adding stuff and it stop it starts to feel like that's just too much I'll take some things out until it feels right uh and then I close it uh but yeah that's that's worked uh I've got uh here's my in fact right now I've got these lights shining on me uh that are Elgato key lights that was one of the uh rewards from closed backlog number seven um so that's been one of the best things in my life because it works for whatever reason that particular mechanism of closing a list of projects that I want to work on uh and that my wife want me to work on wants me to work on just works and I've been using that for uh two or three years now um but just that concept of you close it one time Gracie wanted to add something into it afterwards I'm like sweetie you know better than to do that because then the whole thing will melt down and then it just becomes an open list so we didn't do that again but uh yeah that's that's worked really well for me so yeah that's been my big takeaway from the book is my closed backlog system so David we had a bit of back and forth today about and you described something that gives more of a background to the system I've seen it in the slack group I've seen it you've described it a couple of times but and it makes sense right it's motivating you've got this reward after several items that you've completed on this closed backlog and so you give yourself a rewards you're on number 10 so it's clearly working and you've done some pretty big projects and you've seen the outcome now what what made it took it to a whole other level and made it that much more interesting and more powerful was the concept where you're describing to me um the difference between a pleasurable activity that you can chase after right now or a pleasurable outcome could you just run that bias yeah that's been a alongside this in contributing to this that's been a pretty big concept that's been helpful for me to realize um I heard it like in a tick tock video or a YouTube video or something or just saw a phrase on an Instagram post or something years ago uh and it it was talking about you can either focus on pleasurable activities or pleasurable outcomes so uh what that looks like for me is I can either with a half an hour sit down and watch the office or Parks and Rec for half an hour it's a pleasurable activity I enjoy it it's funny and I've I've used that time in a way that's entertaining to me or I can take that same half an hour and work on a pleasurable outcome something that might not necessarily be pleasurable in the moment but will produce a pleasurable outcome so um you know cleaning my office uh actually no that's pleasurable I like painting my office uh working on my truck I don't like doing mechanic work uh but if my brakes are squealing and I need a replacement pads or replacement rotors I do not enjoy that at all that is just not in my in my wheelhouse but I can do it and I'm good at I just hate it um but once it's done I can take that half an hour which is about what it takes me to do it and switch out my brakes instead of watching the office and Parks and Rec and then I have the ongoing pleasurable outcome of working on a project that produces a long-term effect and so I'm constantly thinking about that it one of the things that kind of uh added impetus to that concept for me is I read a quote a couple of years ago or a I guess it was a quote or just a saying that somebody uh made a video about and it talks about being it says uh choose your heart was the concept I said being poor is hard in savings saving is hard choose your hard uh I think it said uh it had like about five or ten contrasts where both of them were hard it was difficult oh like being overweight is hard as I know very well I have to keep on buying new clothes and exercise is hard and eating well is hard but choose your heart you have to choose which hard you're going to pick and I realized as I was watching the the contrast between the two pairs each time it seemed to be linked to the the the easy path produces a hard result and usually it's the byproduct of pursuing pleasurable activities in the moment like I want to eat a quarter pounder with cheese and bacon that's but then I gained weight so I have the hard on it other side of the pleasurable activity but if I go and work out and and eat well that might not be pleasurable in the moment but it leads to a pleasurable outcome so this closed backlog has been a way to embed pleasurable outcomes on the other side of getting these closed backlogs done um and just constantly pecking away at there's inside of these 10 closed backlogs is probably about 70 or 80 significant projects that I've completed uh so that's it's just been something that's really worked well for me by closing that list okay do you mind if I throw a couple of tasks at you and see what you do yeah right I think you've spoken about this I remember this vaguely um your front porch on your house maybe needs sanding and finishing what are you going to do with that it suddenly occurs to you you're in WorkFlowy either on mobile or at your desktop where are you gonna put that if you don't have it there yet sure so um so basically I've got four ways of things entering into my oh I haven't shared yet there we go I have four ways of things entering into my task list now uh either it's an ongoing commitment marriage family maintaining my property serving others planning I handle those in rhythmic ways so I I create time Horizon flywheels in order to handle those um and and so uh those go on my timeline in a repetitive way if it's something I want to handle once a week like parenting kind of things and hanging out with my kids and making sure that they get to the places that they need to go on a weekly basis um I put them in my timeline uh uh you know so car fluids here's here's one um checking the car the car fluids is a weekly task I just want to check and make sure the oil and and the fluids are fine um and so that's Saturday once I get to Saturday uh and and do that I then will um I'll then move it to the next Saturday if it's a monthly task uh in order to maintain I do some stuff at our church on a kind of monthly basis and that's how I handle that is by making sure I revisit that monthly and I've got some quarterly and yearly things so if it's a commitment I've made and I'm really committed to and it's not just a once off project to handle that uh with my rhythmical flywheels that are embedded in my timeline uh occasionally and really it's only my wife that has permission to do this regularly is to insert things kind of an emergency like stop by and pick up hot dogs and hot dog rolls or something tonight so we can have that for supper um so most emergency things would come they're not emergencies they're just time sensitive like I need to do this today right other people can just intrude into my life like I let my wife do um so if it's time sensitive she can just insert it and I'll just Shuffle things around and if I possibly can and do that uh and then I've got my work stuff so I just have a big chunk every day just dedicated to work whatever's coming and that's painting related stuff and doing bids and actually painting houses and then the other way things get in is through my closed backlog um so that's how I would introduce that so what was your question I've got those four ways and finishing your porch where would you put that so that would immediately I would make a note um uh refinish back deck and then I would move that over here to um calling property and then once I finish my closed backlog and I'm talking to Gracie about what are the next things we need to do because it's not an emergency it's not work related and it's not a a rhythmic kind of thing that I need to do that's just something I need to do about every three or three to five years um so once I finish this closed backlog we'll go through and I'll pull out the things that are obvious contenders to put on the next closed backlog that would be one of them clearly because it needs to be done uh and I would compile a list of possible things to sit down and filter and sort them uh to the things that are the most important and then sit down with Gracie and decide okay what's going to go into the next close back login refinishing my deck is one of those things okay let me throw um let me downsize a little bit and give you something a lot smaller that could possibly derail you for however long 10 20 30 minutes maybe more um you you like the office right let's say you suddenly discovered that you've caught when that the old cast is going to get back together and created season 10. and you want to find out the details that's an incoming thing you're definitely curious at some point you're going to do it what are you going to do if not today I'm going to jot it down uh because anything like that I'm going to jot down so in getting things done David Allen's book he talks about ucds or ubiquitous capture devices so I always carry a notebook with me uh my wallet that I carry my money and credit cards in uh has a three by five card in it uh I've got Siri I can dictate Notes too so anytime something like that comes uh you know uh uh the office reunion I'm gonna say let's say you're sitting at your computer the Internet is just uh a click away there's a chance I will but uh but uh if yeah there's a chance I will because that's the kind of thing that can interrupt me and that's what I'm constantly trying to mitigate in my life but typically what I'll do very often um is I'll I'll make a note in my today list which is just my inbox anything that's in my today is ends up being inbox so it's my tasks and inbox it either gets completed or or sent forward but things like that I'll just make a note and then I'll send it to tomorrow and then in my six o'clock to eight o'clock free play time that I have every day or every weekday um that's when I would do that I would check on that so got a question from Carol from Kelvin um when you get to the end of the closed backlog are any items left do they move to the next closed backlog no the nature of the closed backlog is it's a list of things that I will complete and so right here I've Got My Fire TV 50 inch 4K 4 Series uh television Monitor and I can't it's literally in the box with the straps around it I haven't opened it up it's just been sitting there uh since I so I buy whatever my reward is going to be before I close the backlog and so a part of my next closed backlog is buying my next reward which is going to be a three foot by six foot magnetic glass white board I'm going to mount on so I'll buy that um and once I I have to finish all of those items in order to uh you know open up this television or whatever my my payoff is um so uh so you know what you could do you could you could have your reward as the first task or the first project on your new set of um your new clothes backlog so you get to check that one off pretty quickly which which what is it what you could do is once you get to the rewards so you're going to install your monitor right it's a project in itself it might take how long would it take 30 minutes an hour yeah about an hour you could break out your new uh number 11 your 11th closed backlog and you could put that as the first item on there because that's going to get done pretty quickly so it's a win right pick it up yeah yeah I saw it Cal what is the timeline of the backlog duration up until this point for the first 10 time uh backlogs no no time which is kind of the point anytime and there's just a part of my uh what feels like a weakness uh but I've tried to convert it into a strength um anytime I'm put under pressure unless catastrophe is looming I just back off that's just a part of the way my personality works I I've made for 50 years I've made decisions based on that because that's a reality um I decided not to go into partnership with my brother because we operate differently and he works real well under pressure and the the more pressure he's under the the better he works and like the clearer his head works um and I just literally the higher the pressure unless it's catastrophe like you know finishing my taxes it would be catastrophic not to send my taxes in and have the IRS chasing me or something so I'm going to get that done and sometimes it's you know it's at the last minute so how many years ago did you start this closed backlog system I would say about three years ago it's whenever it's it was soon after I first read the book so so basically sometimes and here's here is the trick for me just my personality it depends on what the reward is so one of them was was this right here and I was in love with Elgato and stream decks and I could not wait to get this thing operational and uh but it just sat there staring at me I'd come home from and walk into my office and there it was in the box um I got that closed backlog which was a lot of work done in probably a week and a half I mean I just knocked I couldn't wait uh I don't care quite as much I'm excited about having this television because it's going to be really useful because I have a lot of meetings in my office and so to be able to cast whatever I want up onto the big screen uh so so tell me if this sounds right because Cal was asking um on average how long have they taken each clothes backlog so if there's three years two weeks and two months okay yeah that's a couple months maybe yeah it's and and the trick for me is there's no pressure it's just whenever I feel like it and every time I see the you know my right now this television I'm like I'll I'll work on the next little task but the fact that there's no pressure is what makes it magic for me I think another interesting and I think this is what you're aiming for is you're limiting your work in progress to I don't know eight ten items you're narrowing it down and you're gonna get those things you're going to eventually work through those items it might be a couple of weeks it might be a couple of months but one of the pluses that I see immediately there is that there's a whole backlog behind that that you cannot get to unless you've gotten through this closed backlog and I imagine what it does is it simplifies things in your mind you don't feel like there's a hundred and one other things you should be working on yeah you get to shelve those lay them to rest until the right time and so you just focused on what's reasonable and what's possible at this point in time and you're working through it a step at a time you're closed backlog with a reward at the end the the nice specifically the nice thing is up until recently I had work my rhythmical flywheels that I you know my promises I've made to myself and others which are on my timeline as rhythmical flywheels uh triage things that my wife needs me to do and I have this closed backlog I also had an open backlog which I've which I've done away with uh and literally started telling people you know it's not on my closed backlog and it's not a commitment I made uh and it's not an emergency so no I can't do it literally I had a meeting with a guy for about three hours yesterday who was asking me to do something a couple days ago who was asking me to do something that wasn't going to take an enormous amount of time but it wasn't work it wasn't an emergency it wasn't a commitment and it wasn't on my closed backlog so I said no I can't do that and so it's been very clarifying to recognize how things are going to enter in those and that's going to be pretty much everything that I do 95 99 of my life is going to come in through one of those Avenues so that's been really clarifying for me to just to be able to say no because I know it's not one of those four things right I think on my end um it plays out in a similar way but not as eloquently every Saturday let me just share my screen and then we'll open this up for questions q a if you folk have questions um those who've stuck around please shoot them through there and we'll happily answer those let me share my screen and um for those who joined us last webinar you will have seen this all right so do you see where I am David yeah okay so let's go and jump to my calendar um I'm gonna search for other and you'll see that I don't have a heck of a lot going in terms of projects I make sure that there's not too much happening so I gotta clip my cockatiels wings that's a much shorter project than sanding a deck but um little projects that I got going things that I need to do I need to move the freezer into the tool shed so that I could make as much ice as I want and start these ice baths that I've been seeing on YouTube I'd love to get into taking ice baths um and so there's not a lot um between July and August in terms of projects uh there's a couple of things around the house concerning let's say the garden umbrella is going to get those recovered so not a heck of a lot but what I wanted to point out and show is that this might be similar to um your closed backlog in that I don't have this as a hard and fast rule I just don't bring in too much into my actual workflow which is in my particular file it might take I might tickle file consists of the next two months up um so I don't have a lot going and I space those out so I don't ever feel like I'm trying to tackle too much so what I have is this forward log and you saw this everyone saw this the last webinar and I've split it up according to family members and over here if we zoomed into Frank you would see projects all kinds of projects uh when I feel that I've I've got some headspace I've got some more room I've got time on my hands I will pull out a couple of items from my forward log from the Frank outline and this is a much bigger outline than all the rest because obviously it pertains to me and this is my list so okay yeah I I don't pull out more than I can handle and especially since I'm I'm getting this book done the WorkFlowy timeline that will be done by um July 28th in just 23 days more or less and so it's all hands on dick for that thing which is my current uh initiative which is something that um Mark Forster goes into the current initiative which is the one thing that you're focused on now that makes some sort of a difference or impact on your future right and so right now I'm I'm careful not to pull some big projects out not to dwell on those projects for too long um get my imagination going just a couple of things that I can handle uh that gets me out and about this one involves just moving the freezer into the tool shed I'm gonna need an extra couple of hands to do that and then I can straight away start making as much ice as I want and it's a matter of uh dumping that ice into the small part of our swimming pool um and at six o'clock that's the idea for at least 30 seconds to start off with getting this ice bath going but that's not a major project not like um overhauling a car or the engine of a car or sending an entire deck which might take a couple of days and refinishing that so I'm careful not to bite off more than I can chew um and but I do have this backlog of items which is not going to invade my life just yet until the time is right okay so let's let's go to some questions now um if you folk have any questions you can pop them into the chat or the Q a who was it that was saying Frank I didn't recognize you without the mustache Bob that was Bob do we have anybody that wants to join us as a panelist for a couple of minutes to chat you can put your hand up and we can upgrade you all right if there's no questions I would oh here we go Kim Heathman where would I find a list of Prior recorded webinars I'm not sure if you're on my mailing list but you might have an inbox you might have an email sitting in your your spam folder um let me grab what is the tab called my YouTube channel I'll grab that I'll grab that for you and on my YouTube channel you can see the two previous ones I did a couple of webinars several years back uh literally seven eight nine years ago um but it restarted a couple of weeks ago so there's two prior ones let me see if I can find my YouTube um channel for you and folks another idea here would be to feel free to to pop anything into the chat box something that you've taken away the the one thing that stood out for you during this particular webinar on um do it tomorrow you can go ahead and read that that question there David uh David what are the four groupings for work entering so for me it's just my my actual work by painting uh so anything having to do with that doing bids having meetings uh and then actually painting houses so there's work there is uh my flywheels which are daily weekly monthly quarterly or yearly um and if I've made a long-term commitment like marriage or uh I'm engaged with this organization uh doing volunteer work that that's a long-term thing that's I'm going to handle that in one of those flywheels and I'll just ask myself for this particular task that I'm asked to do so one of them is I I chair a meeting and it's a once a month meeting so that goes on my monthly flywheel to chair the meeting uh and then write the minutes and send the minutes out to the group uh so it's work it's one of my time Horizon flywheels if it's a long-term commitment uh Gracie can introduce I need you to do this today or you know sometime soon so kind of emergency triage things uh and then my closed backlog so work flywheel uh emergency time sensitive stuff from Gracie and then close backlog those are the four four ways that work enters ideally you are muted Frank I believe I can't hear you all right um Zoe Ann Smith is asking is there a difference between closed a closed list and a closed backlog is there a difference is there any closed list so the closed list is the overarching concept so anything can be have the the characteristics of being closed uh it can be uh uh do it tomorrow close lists and that's how Frank has done it he closes his list and this is what he's going to work on tomorrow and uh and and then anything else that tries to impinge on that if it's not an emergency gets chucked off to the next day for him to address some way uh for me uh I just simply close a backlog it doesn't have any it's not uh there's no deadline to it um so it's for the do it tomorrow there is a deadline because tomorrow has to be done by the end of the day or ideally uh but whereas my closed backlog um is something I'm just going to address with my margin however long it takes me but I will say this the nice thing about the closed backlog it's really contributed to my marriage because Gracie knows if there's something she wants to get wants me to do like I just finished painting our master bedroom and master bathroom closet recently because it was on my close backlog so she knows if there's something she really really wants to get done then she knows to slide that into my closed backlog and it will 100 percent get done as opposed to just saying hey we we should do this sometime uh it may or may not get done but if it's on the closed backlog it's it's really been a a healthy thing for my marriage so she knows how to put things in that she wants to get done and make sure I have a question for you there Dave um you have this closed backlog but you haven't talked much about any sort of other closed lists so your your the things that you've determined the day before that you're going to do today um is that a closed list no or does it keep shifting and changing now that's when I was talking about Kayaking down that waterfall that's how days feel like to me as soon as I you know I can make a plan and have it all scheduled out and how I think it's going to go but then once I wake up in the morning or stand up from here at eight o'clock once my play time's done at the computer uh there's like today I had a very specific plan uh because it was going to rain all day and so I couldn't go to do the exterior job I need to complete but then it uh it cleared up all of a sudden and it was zero percent chance of rain so I packed my stuff up at noon and went in got there worked for about half an hour and then it started pouring down rain even though it still was calling for zero percent chance of rain it was pouring down rain so I packed it all up and came home so it's hard for me I've got enough variables internal and external in my life that it's hard for me to really close it today I just I've got some stuff I know I need to work on that are uh you know one of my flywheels are work related and I'll just keep on pecking away at those as quick as I can so projects bigger things make it into your backlog and then you'll go through a process of selecting those and bringing them into your next closed backlog right yeah but how do you deal with minor distractions so obviously a project might you might go to a rabbit hole um if you had to get involved with that project but minor distractions that could derail you how do you deal with those how did you push them off to another time how do you fend them off uh I have a lot of thoughts about that the reality that I work with is I don't fend them off very well so I've built systems around that fact um so uh I tend to like with work related stuff with actual painting projects for example and since I own my own company and can Define my own terms and don't work for a you know a boss that I have to be accountable to that's good and bad um I can I can cater my work situation to myself so I know I'm gonna get distracted and I just stopped worrying about it after about 30 years of really fretting and going to counseling and you know reading books and trying to solve it I finally realized I don't know if I'm ever going to solve it actually how about if I just rebalance my life to make some space for that reality that I'm going to get distracted and uh and still carry out my commitments and so yeah that's how I've finally addressed it is just realizing uh that's not really important to me and so I've kind of cultivated a life that allows for that for good or bad I don't know that it's really healthy but at least it's healthier than stressing all the time about it so uh Jenny twersky she wrote a nice message there and point three she says she loves the the pleasure the pleasurable actions pleasurable outcomes concept yeah yeah um Sophie is asking how long do you focus on a task for each time I'm not sure if that relates to the backlog the closed backlog or if that's just a general question uh maybe you could clarify that um Sophie and also George he says he he really liked the pleasurable activity versus pleasurable outcome so that was quite that was that was a good explanation there David uh for the backlog items Sophie it's you know I don't it's uh I've got uh I have a general I don't know if this will be helpful I've worked quite a bit let me see if I can I don't know if you can see that but I've laid out my week and that's a pretty accurate view of my week these big green slots right here that are hopefully coming through is a little darker those are my work slots and so I've analyzed my week a good bit the white slots all these little white spaces here that are kind of scattered around um you know up here over the top there's my play time that I told you about that I can just kind of sit and do whatever I want that's the margin in my life that's not already dedicated either to work or to a repetitive thing that I need to do um you know is that a system that you use currency David or is that from previous years and decades that paper-based thing no this is I actually made a video about somebody to ask me about this yeah I've got uh and so I literally just printed it out I've got my three three by five card next action tasks in my weekly calendar uh plan so that's my old timeline system but uh but but this view this is something I probably put about a hundred hours into this concept and thinking and reading and and brainstorming into so you just had a bit of fun recently tinkering around with that and printing it out right yeah yeah because some throwback to your old system right um so essentially I've got margin and that's variable so for example today I had a little bit more margin because I couldn't go to work to do this exterior job so I had a little bit of margin open up and so I could use that to work on closed backlog stuff but uh and then I had a few days worth of downtime for some reason I was in between jobs and I couldn't start a job so I jumped on uh working on painting our master uh bedroom and bathroom which was on my closed backlog and had been there since I I think I closed that backlog about a month and a half ago or so um so Sophie is is back with this question she to clarify she says do you schedule in time each day to work on closed log or backlog items no no and I try and get a reward that really drives my motivation so that's just my personal Little Mix of how I do it um George says the way I try to make a closed list out of something that keeps getting increased such as emails to clear the closed list of yesterday plus one older day so the total inbox slowly gets smaller but I'm still keeping current that's yeah that's yeah that's smart I like that and Russ is asking you what is the device on David's desk that was a major reward for him what does it do Elgato oh the stream deck so I've got one I've got the big one here this is kind of my video production and fortnite gaming over here this is my work so I've got a little one uh here with six buttons it's a Elgato stream deck so you can so for example you can do like I can turn these lights off and on from right here uh you can link any Wi-Fi enabled Outlet to it so you can do all kinds of stuff turning lights off and on you can also direct uh if you're doing video production using something like OBS or stream Labs you can direct like which lights turn off and on and what camera I've got a you know camera over here I can turn them off and on I also can use it for WorkFlowy stuff um so I've got some or I've got some WorkFlowy related macros that I've built that enable me to do stuff inside of workflow just with the push of a button you know if I want to print a particular thing from workflow I can just push a button I've built a macro to print it in a particular way to this printer over here to a different printer um so yeah it's uh Elgato stream deck it's pretty pretty wonderful and that was one of your rewards right that was yeah yeah that was a reward from quite some time back I remember you did a couple yeah it's been a while a couple of years ago yep yep great so David I think we're going to be wrapping this up it's been an hour and a half um let's see if there's any other questions we missed I think that's it I think that's about it I think this is a good time to end so [Music] sorry I got distracted where's the link to the old webinars there's if you scroll up let me just paste it again I've still got this on my clipboard I'm going to paste it be sure to click on that link the link that's just gone into the chat and that'll be my channel there's a bunch of um videos there and I'm going to be uploading the webinar replays over there including this one well Frank it's been fun as always we gotta are we gonna give the folk a a tip a clue as to the next book that we're looking at yes which of the two I can't remember the order what's the next one we're doing your building story weathering story worthy and uh building a second brain so building a second brain is more um it's a system I think uh you might have heard of Thiago forchi or Thiago Forte um his Paris system that might feature there and then uh there's another book by that we're thinking of by uh Matthew Dick's story worthy where he logs memorable parts of his day in a journal I think he does it in a spreadsheet but the idea here is to do it in WorkFlowy a log of some memorable points during your day and so you start racking up stories that you can tell and you begin to craft stories through his storytelling technique which we could give uh a run I'm not that good of a Storyteller but I'd like to give it a go and draw out and dramatize with a couple of those techniques some stories that I could share that are relatable to people so that's an interesting one that I'd like to take a look at and it'll it'll be a crossover into journaling in WorkFlowy and um a bit of maybe even creative writing and if people want to read the books uh you and I have talked about actually making people panelists that they can join if they have some little thing that they want to showcase or ask questions about that so if you want to read that one of those books the building a second brain by Thiago Forte or story worthy by what's his name dicks oh you know what you know where I popped the link it's it's going only to David let me have it go to everybody there we go I learned something new every day this should now be seen by everybody thanks to breezion all right there's a link that'll take you to that YouTube channel you catch up on the two previous webinars all right so we're gonna head on out thanks David for joining us yeah Frank it's been fun and we're going to keep doing this um we're gonna decide on the next book we're going to announce the next book and uh you're welcome to read along with us and as David said join us as panelists to uh at the end the Q a to show us what you've gotten WorkFlowy how you've squeezed something out of a particular book or just to uh have a general Chit Chat it'll be nice to see some faces some live faces all right folks so this is a long good Vine how long are long good buyers it was good to see you I love you now I love you all right David you want to count down you want to count down three two one good to see you guys