In my post Systematic, Fast and Flexible I said that FVP was systematic and flexible but not fast. Accordingly I spent a bit of time developing a variation on FVP called Fast FVP. Those readers who have tried it out have generally speaking found it works well.
However in the post I also said that Autofocus (AF1) was systematic and fast but not flexible. So I’ve now been looking at how I can produce Flexible Autofocus. I’ve been trying this out over the last few days and actually prefer it to Fast FVP.
Here’s how it works:
1. It uses exactly the same rules as AF1 except for the following.
2. When you finish scanning a page, you no longer proceed automatically to the next page and repeat the page scanning procedure. Instead, you scan forward ignoring the page structure until you come to a task that stands out as ready to be done. You may skip over several pages before this happens.
3. Once you have done the task that stood out, you are “trapped” on its page. You have to carry out the full page scanning procedure on that page in order to be released from it. Once you have been released, you repeat rule 2.
4. AF1’s dismissal rules obviously wouldn’t work with this. I don’t see much point in trying to work out a different form of dismissal, so there is no dismissal in this method.
I’m so far very satisfied with how this works. We’ll see how well it stands up in the long term. But there is one challenge yet to come:
The Systematic Next Hour