Peace of Mind Organizing

DWM: My latest task-management passion

7 April 2010

If you’ve been reading my blog awhile (or if you’ve heard me speak), you know I’m crazy about Mark Forster and his time-management principles. One thing I love about him (besides that he thinks in unorthodox ways) is that he’s always dreaming up new ways to do things. It’s not that he’s just improving upon systems he’s invented in the past (though he does do that). Sometimes he just comes up with something completely different.

I’ve learned to trust him. And when he comes out with something new, even if I’m perfectly happy with his current system, I usually give it a try.

On February 1, he debuted a new system that he ended up calling DWM, which stands for Day-Week-Month. This time, rather than testing it extensively before publishing it, he went public with a very early iteration and asked his peeps to try it out and comment.

Always an early adopter with Mark’s stuff, I went for it. And I absolutely love it. It’s been about 10 weeks and the system is working great for me.

You can read the DWM instructions straight from the horse’s mouth, but I’ll try to give you the gist. Lots of folks in the discussion forum at Mark’s website have adapted this for use in an electronic format. I like using paper and pen for task management, so I’ll explain the paper version (which is how Mark presents it).

Take a page-per-day calendar or planner. Enter any new tasks on the page for one month from today. Any tasks you work on but don’t complete, cross off the list and enter one week from today. Circulate throughout all the pages, doing tasks, crossing them off when completed and and crossing them off and reentering them a week hence when not completed. After you’ve done this a week, you’ll likely have tasks you’ve written on today’s date. If you don’t do the tasks that are written today’s date, they expire.

It’s very simple, but it feels very weird at first. It’s hard to write something down on a page a month from now that you know you need to do tomorrow. But once you get used to that, and if you really use the system and keep circulating through all the open pages (which will be up to 31), it works really well.

Here are some of the things I love about it:

• The threat of expiration spurs me into action. If I know I won’t have time to work on tasks tomorrow, I look ahead and make sure I get stuff due to expire tomorrow done today.

• Knowing I have 30 (or 7) days to do something speaks to my inner procrastinator and makes it easier to write it down.

• The directive to write further actions on tasks I’ve started just a week away makes sure I keep up my momentum.

• Having a month to think about doing something gives me time to evaluate whether I really want to do it.

• My DWM task diary is compact.

• I’m typically only looking at a few tasks on a single page, rather than one overwhelmingly long list.

• It allows me to use the Quo Vadis Notor which I love. I already had the pretty robin’s-egg blue pebbled cover from when I was using the Notor for Mark’s Do It Tomorrow system. So I ordered a 2010 refill and I have my lovely little task diary back.

Even if the system sounds a little wacky, I encourage you to head over to Mark’s website and read his explanation of it. (It’s free!) Explore the site while you’re there!

Tagged with: dwm, mark forster, planners, productivity, time management

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