Blogging yesterday about the Pomodoro Technique put me in mind of the search for focus, and how it has eluded me.

A good PIM should do (at least) three things for you:

1. Show the relationship between goals (or higher-level constructs generally) and tasks.  Connect ends and means.
2. Take all the “open loops” out of your brain (where they nag at you without peace) and put them in a trusted system.
3. Help you decide what the best thing to do is in the present.

MLO is great for #1.  (Any hierarchical PIM would probably do.)

Any GTD-ish system is great for #2.  That’s the whole point of GTD.

But #3?  Bit of a mystery.

I used a PIM once — briefly — that sorted everything by importance and by what would fit into the open parts of your schedule and then told you what the next thing to do was. 

It was terrible.  All but unusable.  It was too tyrannical, too dependent on the weights you put on everything.

What I do today is gen up the tasks for the day on a list creatively called “@Today” and then pick something from the list each time I come up for air.

(Oh, and I try to get the “@Today” list to be something that could fit in the day.  I run through my list of things in the morning and see what I think I can accomplish.)

That’s where the religion of Pomodoro is supposed to keep you honest.  By comparing what you thought you could do in a day and what you actually did in a day you’re supposed to get “better.”

I’ve never given up on the notion that focusing on some small # of things (3? 1? One Thing?) will get more accomplished.

The problem is that I often pick things that are urgent rather than things that are important and end up not having much to show for a day or a week.

Am I just longing for someone or something besides me to tell me what to do?

(I have a trick I do sometimes where I get someone else to set me a deadline.)

(“Dan, please finish a draft of 7 Hard Problems by January!”)

(If I say this to myself it has no impact.  If someone else says it to me — even if I tell them myself to tell me — it has much more effect.  Go figure.)

It seems like a simple problem: figure out which tasks are most important and then do them.  But as I’ve struggled with trying to do just that over the past thirty-five years ( which was when I first started using software to help me manage my todo list) I have to admit that the goal remains elusive.