1MTD vs. MYN (michaellinenberger.com)
You can download the ebook for 1MTD on that link. The ebook for MYN must be bought. I haven’t used other resources than his own - I think it is a trademarked system.
But you can get a good feel for the system with the free version. The full version is basically just a fullscale solution that will scale and be manageable with many more tasks than the simple version.
Do you mind if I ask you a little more about your experience with GTD, as someone trying to “get to the summit”? Were you able to achieve the state of calm and focus he talks about, where nothing is floating around your mind bugging you? Was it just too time-consuming to maintain that?
Thanks for the reference - I was looking into this and it seems like it’s entirely urgency based, so important work gets put aside for less important urgent work. It seems like you’d have trouble spending time on stuff that needs to be done but not for a while - how do you deal with that?
I’m no expert on task management systems, but I don’t think it is entirely urgency based. Like many other systems MYN only uses due date for hard deadlines. The start date is the important date and it indicates when you can/should/will start on a task. The system suggest formatting so only “started” tasks are shown and newly-started-today (as defined by the start date) tasks are highlighted slightly. This means you become aware of tasks that you should start working on and this can be well in advance of when it must be completed. It also has a concept of larger pieces of work similar to projects in GTD so you can break it into manageable pieces - this is a difference between 1MTD and MYN.
The weekly review also helps ensure that non-urgent tasks are not forgotten or missed.
Downloaded the free ebook, I like the system, trying it out these past few days, thanks very much @jbmadsen!
I’m much more familiar with GTD, but can try to contrast the two from my very limited perspective on 1MTD. I’m also familiar with systems from Tiago Forte and Mark Forster.
In some ways 1MTD is a very intuitive system, by which I mean helping the human make intuitive choices about what to work on next. This lends itself to Mark Forster’s notion of making progress ‘little and often’, and giving each task adequate attention over time.
David Allen’s GTD does the same, but through rigorous categorization (contexts). The two approaches feel complementary, with 1MTD mostly focussing on managing the ‘next action’ level.
My reading of 1MTD is that the urgency focus really only applies to today, the handful of tasks that actually need to be completed today. The acid test is whether it’s something you’d work late to finish, or go to bed and leave until tomorrow. Everything else, by definition, is merely important (though may become urgent as time passes).
Although he refers to the ‘Opportunity Now’ as an ‘urgency zone’, it’s more like the important quadrant of the Eisenhower matrix, things that you would like to work on next, given the chance. In GTD terms, this is the world of your next actions and their contexts. (Context being the essential ingredient for you to be able to take the action: with this person, in this place, having signal, etc.)
All other tasks are on a rough equivalent of the Someday-Maybe list, what Linenberger calls ‘Over the Horizon’. Not things that need to be progressed now, so keep them out of sight. To avoid them being entirely forgotten, schedule them to pop up for review at some point in the future, as appropriate for the item. That’s the focus on start dates that JB mentioned.
Linenberger also advocates having weekly themes, as part of MYN, what he calls Significant Outcomes. The GTD equivalent might be a subset of the Projects or Areas of Responsibility that you want to keep in eyesight. Not unlike Tiago Forte’s monthly process of putting his PARA projects in priority order.
Tiago wrote a good series of posts about what needs to go into a monthly review vs a weekly review, and a guide to making the weekly review sustainable.
What allows my Weekly Review to be mostly tactical is that my Monthly Review is mostly strategic. What allows the WR to be fast and responsive, is that the MR is slower and more time-consuming. What allows the WR to zero in on just the next week, is that I know I can depend on the MR for monthly course correction.
Mark Forster has written extensively about different styles of list and how each of them supports (or not) being reactive to incoming urgency or the pruning of no-longer-relevant tasks.
Knowing about these things doesn’t always help in managing them though, since your experience matches my own!
Whatever my current implementation looks like, the fundamental ideas about how to structure task-related knowledge remains relevant. For me, that’s strong influences from David Allen (yes, I’ve done the summit), Mark Forster, and more recently Tiago Forte’s PARA/BASB.
Fun fact: it was Mark who introduced me to Beeminder