Do It Tomorrow: Problems with Traditional Time Management

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

From Chapter 4, "The Problem with Time Management"...

To reduce our work, we need to reduce our commitments....The right place for prioritizing is at the level of goals and commitments. Since all of your work flows from your commitments, it is absolutely essential to be selective about which commitments you are going to take on. The only sensible way of doing this is to decide which are the really important ones for your life and work...

Putting our work into a different order [prioritizing] doesn't increase the speed or efficiency with which we are working. Instead in can lead to our having multiple backlogs of 'unimportant stuff'....If we have too much work, prioritizing by importance won't help to cut down the amount of work we have....If we are overscheduled and not leaving enough time, then prioritizing by importance does nothing to help us...

If I have a million tasks to work on, and I put them all in order, while it may help me to determine which task to start working on first, it still doesn't help me finish tasks faster or any more efficiently. Instead, I need to determine which of the million tasks are genuine drop-everything emergencies that I absolutely must work on today, and everything else can be left for tomorrow or some other fixed future date. For really big tasks, I must break them down into smaller tasks that I can fit into the flow of a given day's work, working on a little chunk of it each day. And to reduce receiving millions of more tasks getting added to the list, I need to begin determining what I'm willing to commit to in order to do my best work, and give up what I'm no longer willing to commit to.

All a to-do list consists of is a more or less complete of outstanding tasks which has no relation to a day's work...

The notion of an open-ended, seemingly endless to-do list must be abolished. Instead, I need to break tasks down into meaningful chunks and schedule them ahead of time. But how to do this? One of Mark's suggestions is to schedule time buffers during our workday by adopting the default behavior of Do It Tomorrow for all incoming tasks that aren't genuine drop-everything emergencies or are otherwise date-sensitive. More about how to do this in a future post.