I’ve decided to revisit the original Autofocus system (or Autofocus 1 as it was later called). It’s always been one of my favourite systems, and I want to see what it’s capable of. As the name suggests it’s not just a way of getting lots of work done, but also a way of focusing that work so that it sifts your to-do list to accelerate what is going someplace and gets rid of stuff which is going nowhere. I’m not sure that that this aspect has been explored enough by me, so my intention is to give it a good long run to see how much it succeeds in emphasing the positive and removing the negative.
This means that the tests will be concentrating on quality of work rather than quantity.
So let’s get going.
My first observation is that Autofocus feels quite unlike any other system. There’s an immediate sense of calm and control.
I’ve been working on it now for two or three hours and have accumulated two pages worth of tasks - thirty-one lines to the page, one task per line. From memory it can handle a lot more than that. I’ve done nothing spectacular so far, just the usual routine jobs like email, paper, Facebook, messages, and so on. And of course writing this blog post. This conforms to my recollections of doing it in the past - it always seems to home in on getting the routine stuff right first - getting things to inbox zero.
I’m talking as if the system has a mind of its own, and sometimes it does seem like that. But in reality of course the system is just a vehicle for my mind to operate. The system itself should be as unobtrusive as possible.
Update tomorrow.