Today is the 28th day I have been using v. 3 of SuperFocus. It’s also the day on which I originally intended to release the rules, because today I finished reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace!
When I started the testing I set myself some benchmarks to achieve as quickly as possible. These were:
1. To read Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” in its entirety (in English).
2. To blog my promised review of all the AF etc systems.
3. During the time it takes to do 1. and 2., to go for a walk of at least three miles for an average of at least three times a week.
4. To have no backlogs of any description at the end of this time.
At the time I thought these were quite difficult tests. But in the event they proved so easy that I began to wish that I’d set myself something more difficult.
I’d like to say a bit about each of them:
1. I read War and Peace when I was a teenager. It took me well over a year, and I skipped the Epilogue at the end in which Tolstoy explains his theories of history. This time I resolved to read every word without either skipping or skimming. In the English version it is 560,000 words long, so I managed it at an average of 20,000 words a day. By feeding it as a single task into Column 2 of SuperFocus I ensured that I kept constantly at it.
2. I did exactly the same with blogging the review of systems, i.e. treating it as one large task and feeding it into Column 2. I’d originally imagined that reading War and Peace and writing the reviews would take about the same amount of time. But that proved wildly wrong. Having started the tests on January 22nd, I published the last review of the series on January 29th.
3. I kept up the weekly average of three walks of at least 3-miles each for the first three weeks. By the end of that time I was doing walks of more like 9 miles. Then I was struck down by flu and had to abandon them. But I’ve no reason to suppose that I wouldn’t have kept them going otherwise.
4. There is of course no point in doing specific tasks like these if everything else is allowed to lapse, so it was important to show that nothing else was building up. At the beginning of testing I had a small email backlog, a largish paper backlog, and a big need to sort out my office. Using Column 2, by Day 5 I was clear of all of them and they never reappeared. The only other thing I got behind on was as a result of the flu: I ran up a backlog of subscriptions to the Discussion Forum. This I cleared in less than a day, once I was feeling up to tackling it.
Conclusions:
This is one heck of a powerful system - and I don’t think I’ve experienced anything like everything it’s capable of!