October 7, 2011
You’ve probably heard the expression that the only truly limited resource is time. But I think in reality the most limited resource is your attention. Your attention is the most valuable thing in the world, which is why, for example, advertisers pay so much money to try to get it. Why children clamor for it. Why friends and lovers long for it.
That brings me to my thought for today, which is this: whenever you write down a task you should identify its attention requirement. You should immediately ask yourself, “when do I next need to attend to it?” You can’t attend to everything at once—you can’t “do it all” now—so you need to spread out, appropriately, when you attend to your list of tasks and only focus right now on those things that need your attention.
That’s what the MYN urgency zone approach is all about. When you write down a task, ask yourself “Do I need to attend to it and get it done today? If so, it goes in the Critical Now urgency zone. Do you need to attend to it in the next couple days or say a week? Then you put it in the Opportunity Now section. Or can it wait more than 10 days to put your attention on it? If so, you put it in the Over the Horizon urgency zone. MYN is all about identifying the attention requirements of tasks, and acting accordingly.
Michael
Hello Mr.Linenberger.
I’ve read your Outlook book and been applying it for some weeks now. Just want to say that this ToDo system is clearly superior to anything else that I have seen. Congratulations for developing such a well rounded system. The only two things I am missing is a bit more detail in how to write and track goals and projects and the GTD context tags. I find those tags useful during Monday’s deferred to review tasks check.
My most sincere congratulations. And thanks for helping me to get in control with your system.
Oliver