What You Don't Measure, You Can't Control

After this discussion on the GTD newsgroup, I picked up a copy of Mark Forster's latest book, Do It Tomorrow. I'm trying to see if there are any good ideas that may help me improve the effectiveness of my GTD system, and also just to find out what other systems are out there.

I'm only up to about Chapter 3 so far, so I won't go into a big compare/contrast analysis of his method, but one thing that I picked up straight away is his suggestion to try to quantify the amount of "randomness" in my day.

His idea goes something like this: each day is filled up with 2 types of activities - those that were planned, and those that were not. He calls the latter "randomness" - ie. things that randomly crop up and take up time, including things you might randomly just decide to do on the spot, like watch TV or chat with a colleague (or post a blog).

He recommends you make a plan for the day, his "Closed List", of what you are going to get done. The closed list has a line at the bottom of it, and you write down everything else you do during the day under that line. By doing this properly (which means honestly), you can numerically quantify what percentage of your day was filled with "randomness".

Putting the benefits or drawbacks of the "Closed List" concept aside for now, I definitely like the idea of a metric to find out unambiguously how much of my day is ruled by me and how much by my environment. GTD has an operational problem in that it's very easy to spend too much time Collecting, Processing, Organising and Reviewing and almost no time Doing any of the Next Actions on your lists. There's no framework or guidelines to maximise the Doing time.

I've always believed that you can't control what you don't measure. That's why the most successful thing I've ever done to lose weight is to religiously weigh myself every morning. Even when I'm not really trying to watch what I eat, just getting on the scales every day keeps the weight down - I assume it's due to some kind of sub-conscious mechanism that has control of my hunger impulse.

So I'm curious whether the same could work for GTD. David Allen recommends strongly against daily to-do lists, so presumably he doesn't agree with Mark Forster's "Closed List". I'm undecided - so long as the "Closed List" was made up of Next Actions from my GTD system, it seems like a reasonable approach. But, again, putting that aside for now, at the very least it should be possible to quantify each day how many Next Actions from my GTD system I do, and how many "random" other things I do. And just like weighing myself every morning, I reckon just seeing that number every day might just help keep my focus on the Next Action lists.

So this week I'm going to try an experiment: I will write down absolutely everything I do that isn't a Next Action from my GTD system, and at the end of each day tally up the Next Actions vs the Randoms. (For completeness, I will also track the hours I spend working on my GTD system as Randoms.)

I'll post the results of my experiment next week.