Autofocus compared to DIT
Sunday, January 11, 2009 at 14:03
Mark Forster in Articles, Autofocus, Do It Tomorrow

Some people have commented that they are thinking of staying with Do It Tomorrow rather than change permanently to Autofocus because one is more certain of getting important tasks done quickly.

I’m certainly not going to quarrel with anyone who uses DIT - it’s still an excellent system - but my own experience has been very different.

With DIT the maximum number of tasks I ever processed in one day would have been around 35-40. Of those probably 5 or less would have been “same day” tasks. There would also frequently have been days on which I didn’t get through the list and had to carry tasks forward to the next day.These would probably average out at about 5 tasks. So the speed of movement for DIT would have been something like this:

Day 1                        5 tasks

Day 2                      30 tasks

Day 3 onwards         5 tasks

Total:                      40 tasks

With Autofocus the spread is different. Taking a typical day last week, the breakdown was:

Day 1                      25 tasks

Day 2                      30 tasks

Day 3 onwards       11 tasks

Total:                      66 tasks                   

Autofocus not only is capable of dealing with a higher volume of tasks than DIT, but also has a faster average response time per item (1.3 days, as compared to 1.5 days for DIT).

Article originally appeared on Get Everything Done (http://markforster.squarespace.com/).
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