In case you missed our In Memoriam post for Mark Forster, it’s a posthumous guest post by Forster himself about his system he called Final Version and that we call Forster Lists or sometimes Dot Lists. It includes a link to this implementation that @bee made:
And then in the comments, Adam Courtemanche pointed us to his own version that I think is the best one I’ve seen:
I just wanted to share that (and I have a beemergency to move something from the Discord to here in the forum for posterity). If you have your own favorite to-do list system you want to share, by all means.
By default, Trello boards create lists that have dots that you can check off to indicate that they’re part of your queue for a Forster list.
Trello boards with a list is the default way to use the application. You don’t need to setup any automation to create a Forster list, and it is already actually 98% of the way towards a working Forster list setup.
New tasks get added by default to the bottom of your existing list.
Trello is a highly mature application with native apps for every notable platform and a website that can be used everywhere it doesn’t have a native app
Trello’s cloud sync is SaaS enterprise-tier reliable.
Cons
A paper Forster list allows you to see previously completed, or crossed out tasks naturally taking space alongside tasks that are in the process of being completed, which I think is a big part of the motivational aspect of a Forster list. An ideal Forster list application would be a STABLE UNIT TESTED or ideally open source digital version of a paper Forster list, AKA a gigantic list that you can scroll thru to see past tasks, add dots, cross things off, or send things to the bottom of the list. It would also need to have cloud sync so your tasks don’t disappear into the ether, and a good PWA implementation so it can be added to the home screen of a phone where most tasks tend to be captured for people in this day and age.
You can’t see where completed tasks fall in the overall list, unlike a paper Forster list.
It’s geared for execution, not task management. It puts the focus on the current benchmark task (in purple), the next candidate task, and the question of whether to “dot” it. The green progress bar tells me how far down the list I’ve gone.
The biggest deviation from a physical list is that there’s no underlying order, from the perspective of this prioritization UI. There’s just the chain, items that have been considered but rejected, and the rest of the list. This lets me pull the tasks in from anywhere. My main task list is a Markdown note in Obsidian.
“Dislodge” removes the benchmark from the chain without marking it complete.
My task list is a few hundred items long, and I’d often gladly procrastinate by clicking Yes/No/Can’t forever, so it stages these interventions:
The reason it can do that, and the reason that the UI distinguishes between “No” and “Can’t” is that it maintains an underlying estimated rank for each task (loosely based on this). “Can’t” allows me to reject a task without it being taken as a signal that the rank should be lowered.
The rank estimates save me a lot of time because it allows the UI to present candidates that I’m actually likely to add to the chain. New tasks have a uniform prior, so they tend to be presented too.
Here’s a sample of tasks and their estimated ranks:
If you actually look closely at that list, be nice to me. It’s a cooler visual if I show real data. Don’t forget Forster’s criteria is whether you “want” to do something.
