Do It Tomorrow (and Other Secrets of Time Management) - Mark Forster
Read 09.10.17
“Do we have a shortage of time? No, we don’t. Time is the medium in which we exist. To complain about a shortage of time is like a fish in the sea complaining that it has a shortage of water.”
I typically try to stay away from self-help books, just because after the first five or so, you pretty much get the gist of all self-help books— you need to change your habits, and only you can change them. There it is. However, that doesn’t mean these books still carry some inspirational quotes. Chances are, every self-help book you pick up could offer you a couple tips and tricks to boost your productivity/creativity/whateveryouwanttoimprove. Here’s what I got out of Do It Tomorrow.
“It is surprising how easy it is to forget that the way to get things done is to do them.” (pg. 130)
One thing self-help books try to get you to do is to persuade yourself that procrastination is beatable. Do It Tomorrow tackles this idea by suggesting a system in which you implement of closed list of things you need to do today, and to refrain from adding more things to that list. If anything comes up, they recommend you move it to tomorrow’s closed list (if it’s not an emergency). This way, you get to feel the dopamine rush of completion as you cross off every item on your list at the end of the day. What do I think of this?
On a general note, I agree with the sentiment. Knowing that you were able to complete a day’s worth of work is a warm feeling of accomplishment. On another note, it made me wonder about the nature of procrastination itself.
“In fact this is how we generally judge the difficulty of a proposed action— by how much we are resisting it rather than by how much skill or technical expertise it will take.” (pg. 10)
After reading this line, I realized this is exactly how I perceive work as I transition into procrastinating. When I don’t feel like working on something, it’s caused by a measurement of how much effort I’d have to commit into getting it done. To a degree, this quantification is related to how much skill/technical expertise the assignment requires, but the final decision to work on it or not is determined by the former.
The weird thing is that as I’m conceiving a way to trick my mind into not procrastinating, the answer seems to be to just beat it. When you feel like procrastination, don’t. What more do you need? I tried crafting a way to convince the mind that you don’t need to procrastinate but deleted that draft since by the end I stopped making sense to myself (or the whole thing seemed purposeless).
So here’s the key to success and happiness and everything rainbow: Don’t procrastinate. Put in effort. Just do it.
Nike was right all along.
Favorite snippets below:
“Many articles and books on creativity encourage us to ‘think out of the box’ and get rid of all the restrictions on our thinking. The trouble with this advice is that it is almost entirely wrong. It is very difficult to be creative when ‘anything goes’ and you have no limitations, because it is the limitations that actually encourage creativity.” (pg. 24)
“Every time we do something that wasn’t in our plan for the day, we have allowed a random factor to come in and disrupt our work. It doesn’t matter what it is— it means that we are doing something that we didn’t plan to do.” (pg. 30)
“Now I am not saying that there is anything wrong with having interests. A person without any interests would be very dull. But it is immensely important to distinguish between having an interest in something and having a commitment to something. It is commitment that will make the real difference in your life and work.” (pg. 35)
“And finally it is impossible to be effective without both creativity and order. Effectiveness is not a quality on its own; rather it is a measure of how far the order in your life allows your creativity to express itself.” (pg. 44)
“To be on top of our work we must have goal that define both what we are going to do and what we are not going to do. Enthusiasm will come from the knowledge that our goals are real goals about real work— work that is going to use all our skills and talents in the business of taking our lives forwards. We love our work when our work is under our control— but not when we are under its control.” (pg. 73)
“Effectiveness = Creativity X Order” (pg. 97)
“For almost any initiative, the route to success is regular, focused action. I can’t guarantee that you will succeed at everything you apply this rule to, but even if it doesn’t work out you won’t need to blame yourself for failing to put in the effort… Doing something keeps the initiative alive. Doing nothing lets it die.” (pg. 132).
“The effect of observing your feelings will be to make you more aware of them, and that in itself will tend to have the effect of improving them.” (pg. 168)