gnugrep said:
Responding to Gameboy70, my "lists" are actually just single sheets of paper, one item per page, stuck together in a folder. My next action folder usually has just 10-15 pages, which I can pretty quickly shuffle through to find what I want to work on next. I believe I got this idea from the Allen book, but I’m not sure. How many people work this way as opposed to having one piece of paper with lists of NAs?
Like Gameboy70, I don't see the advantage. No matter how quickly you may shuffle through 15 pieces of paper, one could scan through 15 items on one page much faster. The visual separation of all those items on separate sheets also creates much more of a load on working memory, which can hold about 5 items for a matter of seconds. Plus, I doubt this method would scale. Once your collection of actions grows to, say, 30 or more -- which is not inconceivable -- it will be hard to choose among them from the runway level, in my opinion.
The single-sheet method
was recommended in the book for doing mind sweeps. But I personally think the additional overhead and slowness of using single sheets even just for mind sweeps would benefit only someone with a
severe difficulty focusing. In some of my mind sweeps I have generated 150 items; there's no way I'm going to use 150 separate sheets of paper. I've written about 50 items per 2-column page and had no problem whatsoever processing one item at a time by starting with the first and crossing it out when finished processing it, saving a lot of time and paper in the process. And yet, using my computer is far more efficient still, typing each item in Palm Desktop.
The overhead of collecting, processing, organizing, and reviewing is just that -- overhead. If you can accomplish those 4 steps in less time, it gives you more time to Do.