A
fter first hearing about the book years ago, I finally got around to ordering and reading Mark Forster's "Do It Tomorrow" time management text. There's a lot going on in here, but the fundamental idea is that most people have no idea a) how much work they can handle, b) how much work is being generated in their lives, and c) how to get rid of their backlog of work. One of the main strategies he advocates is for deferring basically all incoming work for tomorrow, except in true emergency situations. If you keep trying to handle work reactively as it comes in, you quickly get disordered, and have very little control or knowledge of how much you are doing, and how much you are falling behind. By creating a day's buffer between you and your work, you can perceive whether you are, on average, accomplishing a day's worth of work in a day, or not.
It's an excellent book, and I've already learned, and put into action, a great deal from what he talks about. Obviously, we'll need to see whether I can stick to the principles and plans over a longer period of time to know just how good the book is, but Forster seems to have a very good grasp on human nature and systems planning, and a lot of this resonates with me.
It's a good feeling when you accomplish all the things you wanted to in a day. In reality, this is all that Forster is trying to strike at -- letting you find a way to consistently have achievable goals, and meet them. Part of me is always a bit nervous around the "life optimization" practitioners, as I worry that trying to be so effective can unduly develop pride, and lead us into distraction from our true ends. I also have a nostalgic attachment to the place of whim in my life, but it's not immediately clear to me that that whimsical streak isn't the real distraction. What I like about Forster's advice is that it makes me look directly at what I'm doing, and why; and that sort of attentiveness seems to me a good thing indeed.