Tools for Thought

One of the blank spots in the Getting Things Done system is the lack of a method for handling repetitive tasks, like exercising or writing. If done regularly enough, these routines would become familiar enough that not doing them would be an anomaly and feel odd. The trick is getting to that point in the first place. If you put down “Practice Tai Chi form” on your @Home list, do you check it off once you’ve done it? If so, how to you set a reminder for next time? If not, how do you keep from overexposing yourself to the action after you’ve done it for that day?

Three years ago, thinking I was missing some part of GTD that handled this, I asked David Allen if there was any best practice for staging recurring reminders. He said, “No. Anything you see on a regular basis, you’ll go numb to.” So much for sage advice. Well, he did sheepishly offer one suggestion afterward.

Set irregular reminders in your tickler file

The key word is irregular, meaning that the onus on on your mental RAM to maintain the routine most of the time, but reinforcing it with occasional reminders from your system. You’ll pay more attention to them if you don’t expect them. David suggests dropping reminder notes in random dates in your tickler file, perhaps one or two a week. The note can be a simple status check like, “How am I doing with the Tai Chi?”, or you might use a blank journal page instead, making an entry each time the page resurfaces (reinserting it in the tickler in a new random date).

Instead of a random date, I prefer the “forgetting curve” approach, where you set the reminder for when you anticipate the routine to break down. You ask yourself, “When will I forget this?”, then drop the reminder in your tickler file the day before you expect to forget it. Deliberately avoid setting reminders too far in advance, since reminding yourself of something you’re not forgetting yet defeats the purpose.

The Seinfeld Chain

This is an increasingly popular method of maintaining a regular discipline, based on a piece of advice that software developer Brad Isaac got in a nightclub from none other than Jerry Seinfeld. Isaac asked the standup veteran if he had any advice for a young comic, and Seinfeld gave him a tip to improve his joke writing.

He told him to get a year-at-a-glance wall calendar and a magic marker. For each day that he completed the task of writing, but an X over that date. Seinfeld continued:

After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.

As you can probably imagine, this advice ports well to just about any routine you want to establish. A wall calendar is probably more effective, but I do the something similar with a spreadsheet. I lay out blog or freelance article titles for each day in an Excel editorial calendar a week in advance within a spreadsheet (used for adding other information, like contacts and word counts) that continues to the end of the year. When the article or post is completed, I change the cell’s background from white to gray, lengthening a nice gray chain.

I used to create Seinfeld Chains in new categories in the Palm Desktop. These categories would be separate from my default calendar to prevent overexposure. But while these were effective for reaffirming that I did my task for the day, they were ineffective to reminding me to do them in advance. That’s where having a persistently displayed paper calendar is vastly superior. For some reason, I never had this problem with the spreadsheet — probably because it didn’t have to compete with a default calendar.

Checklists

When you organize next actions by context, the physical location cues you to review the corresponding list. As mentioned, the problem with next action lists is that recurring actions either get displayed persistently, reducing your likelihood of paying attention to them, or get checked off, cancelling reminders for the future.

Having a routine checklist that’s separate from your standard action lists can be an effective way of getting around this. You can stick this list in your tickler file, but instead of migrating it to random dates when the tasks on the list have been completed, you just drop it in the next day’s folder.

In an electronic system, you can actually combine this checklist with your task list by making it the top entry, titled “Daily Routines,” with the checklist inside of the listing’s Notes field. Then it doesn’t matter if you see the item each day. Since you’re only seeing the name of the checklist on your task list, and not the individual actions the contain, you won’t get overexposed to them. You have to open that checklist to see its contents.

Incidentally, if the recurring task is regular but infrequent, there’s nothing wrong with putting them on the calendar. It’s not likely that you’ll get overly familiar with something you see once a week or longer.

None of these strategies are perfect, but they’re better than either relying entirely on your memory or keeping permanent action items on your calendar or lists. If you have any better ways of keeping yourself on a routine, please let me know in the comments.

(Photo credit: Nimages DR)

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