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s I often do, I'm thinking about the Do It Tomorrow system, and how to make it work. My relationship with it is always evolving, as I try to make things work as smoothly and satisfyingly as possible, and I have some points of emphasis that I want to enumerate.
1. The big pair of questions that DIT seeks to answer is "how does work enter your life?" and "when do you accomplish it when it does?" It's crucial that this is only secondarily a planning system. It's much more a tracking system, that allows you to see your work all laid out before you. So, the system is not about taking some time to plan out your work for tomorrow, according to "what you think you can handle" on that day. Rather, it's about noticing when a new piece of work has entered your life, and rather than doing it then or ignoring it, writing it down immediately on your list for the next day. You don't need to plan based on what you think you can handle, because if you are not overcommitted, then the work that enters your life on a particular day must itself on average be able to be completed in a day, and therefore doesn't require planning. If you are overcommitted, then no planning in the world can fit more than one day's work into a day. So; become attentive to how work comes into your life (whether it be emails, things arriving in the mail, something breaking, something running out, noticing some small task you'd been meaning to get to), and always have your list for tomorrow close to hand, so that you can immediately jot it down for the next day.
2. You need to get addicted to checking things off the list. This means that lots of small tasks is far superior to a few big tasks. Break projects into steps and write them in individually. Spread work out over days whenever possible. Make tasks small enough that you don't experience mental resistance to doing them, and you still get a hit of accomplishment when they're done.
3. This is related to the last; make sure that list items have a completely unambiguous binary divide between completed and not-completed. You want to avoid the feeling of "should I keep working on this/return to working on that to get a little more done?" This kind of questioning disturbs one's inner peace tremendously. When a task is done, it is done, even if the task was just "start doing X" (a technique I use a lot). Do your damnedest to avoid large projects that must be completed quickly, which encourage this kind of background stress and "bleed-over" work.
4. Also related to (2): don't set aside "special days" to accomplish big tasks, at the expense of other things. This is sometimes unavoidable (e.g. just yesterday had to drive all day to pick up my sisters-in-law from the airport), but in general, try to treat each day as fundamentally similar to each other day; full of a wide variety of small tasks. "Special days" for doing things like cleaning the whole house, or stacking wood, or writing a whole essay, or building a chicken coop, first of all tend to disrupt the rhythms of other work, but also have a great deal of mental resistance associated with them -- it's hard to plan them, and hard to get those days started. Mileage may vary on this one, depending on personality, but I find that actually making those big days happen, as efficiently as I was hoping, is a rare and difficult occurrence, and I get far more accomplished doing a little bit of those tasks at a time instead.
A few things that popped into my head; I'm sure there will be more.