I haven’t yet read DIT but it is going on my “To Do List”.

Too bad it’s not going to your “Will-Do list”, as you may never get to this task using a traditional to-do list…

Seriously now, I believe DIT and GTD are both incomplete on their own, but work excellently together.

I haven’t yet read DIT but it is going on my “To Do List”.

Once you experience the novel feeling of crossing off all items in your list, maybe you’ll then have enough motivation to create increasingly larger lists…

It also helps me group projects to tackle as logical groups.

Great article. The amount of work I had to do was overwhelming and creating lists was the only thing that got me through it. I have stopped doing that but your article reminded me of it’s value.

I would write out a list of everything I would like to get done. Then add value and importance of each of those. If it wasn’t that important I would cross it off the list.

It’s important to create a list but also to important take time to sit back and think about whether you are going in the right direction. Many people get caught in the trap of getting things done without wondering whether they are doing the right things or not.

Great article,

Alex

In fact, I found out that I operate in two completely different modes (with completely different mind sets): planning and doing.
In many cases, it’s the mix of these two states that leads me to both poor planning and poor implementation.

Thanks for your great comment!

Your article really resonated with me. I have been doing GTD for years. I am on my sixth day doing DIT. My experience parallels yours. I do not read your article as a criticism of GTD, but rather as a means to make GTD even more effective.

Pre-GTD I was not keeping good track of my commitments. Post-GTD I was always on top of my work in the sense that I knew what all of my commitments were and what I still needed to do to complete my projects. But, minute-to-minute I wasted a lot of time because I was always deciding what to “on the fly” so to speak. At the end of the day I often felt remorse for having wasted too much time.

DIT is one of those great tricks that gets me to act in a much more efficient manner. If you ask me when I wake up in the morning if I want to have chocolate cake in the evening before I go to bed, I will tell you, “No!” But if you ask me before I go to bed in the evening if I want some chocolate cake now, I am much more likely to answer, “Yes!”

DIT takes advantage of the fact that when I think about what to do in the future, I tend to make wiser, more rational, decisions than I do when I think about what to do now. With DIT, I decide today what I am going to do tomorrow. I rarely decide today that tomorrow I want to eat chocolate cake, watch TV, and read mindless junk on the internet. With DIT I write down today what I will do tomorrow.

DIT is one of those neat little gimmicks that works. I make a game out of it. Each day I strive mightily to cross off every item on that day’s list. In the past, I did not feel any pressure to keep pushing hard, because I did not have a defined list of items that I was striving to complete. Now, with DIT, I do. If I finish my list early in the day, I then work on other items or I goof off. If I do goof off, I do so without guilt or remorse, because I have the satisfaction of knowing that I’ve done what I’ve set out to do that day.