Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management

The day's list is written the day before and then closed. Work that arrives today goes onto tomorrow's list; today's list is yesterday's, and because nothing is being added to it, it can actually be finished. That is the whole trick in the title, and Forster spends the book on what follows from it.

What follows is that an open list can never be completed, so it never gives the signal that the day is done, and everything on it competes with everything else — which is why prioritising becomes a task in itself and never ends. Closing the list changes the question being asked. If the day's list will not clear, that is not a sequencing problem to be fixed by better ranking: it means too much has been taken on, or there is not enough working time, and ranking individual tasks is what hides that from view. The other piece is the current initiative — one project worked first thing, before mail, even for a few minutes, and kept as the initiative until it reaches a real finishing point.

It lands for someone whose incoming work is roughly steady and mostly their own: a small business, a desk job with a predictable flow, anyone who has tried a capture-everything system and drowned in the list. The reservation is that it assumes a day its reader controls. Genuinely interrupt-driven work breaks a closed list on contact, and Forster's answer — take on less — is advice about a negotiation many people are not in a position to hold. It is also a short book that circles its own ideas more than once.