Three days ago I decided to stop experimenting with new systems and to concentrate on using Autofocus. I know Autofocus works, and I want to see just how far it will take me. I’m particularly interested in how well the auto-focusing aspect of it (after which it’s named) will work in the long-term. Just to recap, the theory behind Autofocus is that you can throw any ideas, brainwaves, pipe-dreams, etc, into it without prior evaluation and the system itself will sift them and enable you to concentrate on what is really important to you.
Of course we often don’t really know what is really important to us. Even if we’ve gone through an exercise in writing down our important goals, the results are often contaminated by what we think we “should” have as our goals. Another problem is that we sometimes don’t know that something would be important to us because it hasn’t yet appeared on our scene.
My vision for Autofocus is that through its unique sifting process we will have our goals and vision clarified for us. Perhaps it would be better to express that as “we will be able to clarify our goals and vision”, because Autofocus is after all no more than a framework to allow our intellect and our intuition to work in balance.
After several months of experimenting with other systems I’ve succeeded in reducing my life to a satisfactory state of chaos. So what are the areas that I particularly hope Autofocus will now sort out for me? There are loads, but I think the top three would be:
1) I need to get simple business of running my daily life back on track. Many things are not too bad: my email is up-to-date; my finances are under control; I don’t have huge backlogs of work. But I do badly need to sort out my office which is in a mess; I need to get into a sustainable routine of blogging, tweeting, and writing my newsletter, and I need to take a lot more exercise.
2) I need to get a vision of what I am doing. I’ve been hovering around being “semi-retired” for far too long. I need to have a clear focus. My feeling at the moment is that I want to get my business going again. This needs testing and affirming, and progressing with some positive action.
3) I need to avoid taking on commitments without a positive vision of what they are for. People who are newly retired and still in reasonable possession of their faculties are particularly vulnerable to “commitment creep”, i.e. the steady accumulation of commitments for no other reason than that they seemed a good idea at the time. I’m beginning to notice this in myself and I want to be far more rigorous about it.
Just how much can I expect Autofocus to help with all this? I intend to find out, and my intention at the moment is to blog regularly on my progress. The real test of Autofocus is not statistics on how many tasks one has carried out, but how well it’s sorted out areas such as the three above.