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December 23, 2008

Do It Tomorrow

Interesting title for a time management book, but he's basically saying to collect all the stuff that comes in today and actually do something about it tomorrow so you don't get distracted from today's work.

Instead of To Do lists he recommends closed Will Do lists. "Closed" meaning that you write down the things you will definitely do tomorrow and draw a line under it. If anything else comes up, it gets moved to tomorrow's list and so on. It's an amazingly refreshing experience to actually finish off a list and not feel there are still a million things you're not doing. It also helps you contain your commitments because you don't want to overwhelm your daily list by adding even more to it--you can see how much you can handle in a day.

Trent over at The Simple Dollar has a more complete summary here. I have not yet read Forster's other books, but Trent also has a summary of one called Get Everything Done which looks interesting.

Mark Forster also has a website and blog which is wonderfully low-key and British. He's not like the in-your-face American time management gurus. He's got a much more laid-back style. It's a wonderfully simple system that can be implemented the next day, unlike more complicated ones like David Allen's Getting Things Done. I'm still an Allen fan but will now be doing a kind of hybrid DIT and GTD method taking my favorite aspects of each.

Again, it's British so Amazon or some used bookstore sites will be your best bet in finding it right now.