Also available on Amazon.com, Amazon.fr, and other Amazons and bookshops worldwide!
Wednesday, March 4, 2009 at 15:33 The Portuguese translation of the Autofocus Instructions is now available. Many thanks to the translator.
As far as I am aware there are no more translations in progress, but I would really like to have an Arabic one if anyone is prepared to take this on.
Friday, February 27, 2009 at 9:56 A Japanese translation has now been added to the Autofocus instructions.
With many thanks to the translator.
A Portuguese translation is nearing completion.
Monday, February 23, 2009 at 14:48 There is now a Chinese version of the Autofocus instructions in simplified characters (as used in mainland China).
Many thanks to the translator.
Saturday, February 21, 2009 at 10:01 Hard on the heels of the Chinese version is the Russian version of the Autofocus instructions. Again many thanks to the translator.
Saturday, February 21, 2009 at 9:29 A Chinese version of the Autofocus instructions is now available. Coming soon the Russian and Portuguese versions.
Anyone like to take on the task of translating them into Japanese or Arabic? My books have been translated into both these languages.
Many thanks again to all the people who have taken the trouble to translate the instructions - for no reward except their own desire to see AF spread round the world.
Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 12:01 A Korean Version of the Autofocus instructions is now available. Coming soon: Chinese and Portuguese. Many thanks to the translators for their hard work on these.
Monday, February 16, 2009 at 14:58 A French version is now available on the Autofocus instructions page in addition to the Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish versions.
Sunday, February 15, 2009 at 22:01 Here’s what you have all been waiting for:
Many thanks to TaraghB for interviewing me and producing and editing the video.
Saturday, February 14, 2009 at 22:57 A new Yahoo Group has been started for Autofocus:
This group is for users of Mark Forster’s AutoFocus productivity approach, both paper and digital. Group members provide information and encouragement as we work our tasks from page to page.
Saturday, February 14, 2009 at 11:34 These are the most popular pages on this website over the last week (number of hits in brackets)
| 26,610 | Autofocus System |
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| 11,964 | Discussion Forum |
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| 5,005 | Home |
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| 2,446 | Blog |
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| 1,861 | Blog - 100 Productivity Blogs |
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| 1,358 | Discussion - This is a to-do list |
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| 1,307 | Do It Tomorrow Review |
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| 1,119 | Discussion - Making money out of AF? |
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| 1,067 | Discussion - Moving through the pages |
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| 974 | Discussion - Autofocus Flowchart |
Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 21:22 Autofocus has been reviewed on Life Hacker in an article entitled Autofocus is a Single, Paper-based List Organization System.
If you like Autofocus please go to the Life Hacker article and comment on it!
Monday, February 9, 2009 at 22:55 You can now follow my Autofocus adventures on Twitter - screen name AutofocusTM
Thursday, February 5, 2009 at 22:17 There’s a very useful list just been published on www.matchacollege.com called 100 Blogs to Make You More Productive. It includes this site and some of my own favourites, plus some very useful sites I hadn’t come across before. Well worth a look!
Sunday, January 25, 2009 at 12:57 There’s an interesting article in the Economist about how people procrastinate less when given concrete tasks, rather than ones which require abstract thinking. This could well be relevant to how we should phrase the tasks we write in Autofocus or Do It Tomorrow (or any other time management system).
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12971028
As the team report in Psychological Science, in all three studies, those who were presented with concrete tasks and information responded more promptly than did those who were asked to think in an abstract way. Moreover, almost all the students who had been prompted to think in concrete terms completed their tasks by the deadline while up to 56% of students asked to think in abstract terms failed to respond at all.
Saturday, January 24, 2009 at 9:53 It’s not often that we get the chance to see quite as clearly as we do in this video how pundits and experts can be completely and totally wrong. But if the people ridiculing and condescending to Peter Schiff in this video are deceiving themselves, how sure can we be that our most cherished convictions are correct?
Thursday, January 15, 2009 at 12:28 Another selection of comments about Autofocus. These ones have been received since the last selection. As usual I have not attributed them, but you can find any of them in the original context by using the search box at the top of the left-hand margin.
“The interesting thing about being addicted to the MF Discussion forum, and spending several hours per day scouring the posts, is that in the 4 days of using AF, I have been more productive, felt more free with my creativity and been a better all around human being to my wife and animals than I have been in months. Possibly years.”
“I’m only on day 3, but I feel I’ve gotten more done with AF with less stress. With GTD (which I used for a couple of years), I spent a lot of time worrying about the order of things on my list. With AF, that stress is gone. I work on things when they stand out (typically “I feel like it”, but sometimes “It has to be done now”). The intuitive nature of AF really appeals to me.”
“It is this ability that the AF system gives me to work much more intuitively that is really doing it for me. I genuinely feel that I am calmer, less stressed and more in control of everything since implementing it.”
“While I still have room for improvement, I am finding I’m consistently doing more work on things before they are due and chipping away at stuff I’d normally ignore through extreme procrastination. I never finish my closed lists anyway so I’m not missing out on that satisfaction! I feel better about myself because I do far less procrastination (and will hopefully eliminate it all together once the system finds equilibrium - ie I’ve caught up with my backlog, readjusted to a more sustainable workload and find myself regularly working on things before they are urgent).”
“Here is what I have found so far, in my first week of using AF. 1) It’s so easy to use that I don’t have to worry about being too invested. I didn’t have to buy software or change any major habits. 2) I’m feeling much more “laid back” about my work as I’m doing it. Perhaps it’s because I’m not forcing myself to do things, and I’m allowing myself to do things partially and then come back to them later. 3) I know what to put on the list and what I need to do when I look at it; it is making me trust myself more. And no, I don’t have a million undone projects lying about. 4) When I do my other, scheduled, non-AF work, I am also more “laid back” because I am not worrying as much about all the stuff I have to do - somehow I know that, yes, I do have a crushing number of tasks waiting for me, but once I turn my attention to them, they will be dealt with in an efficient and intuitive manner. 5) I’m no longer watching the clock all the time. I was in the habit of using my kitchen timer a lot and this week I haven’t needed it. I enjoyed using the timer but I must confess that I feel FREE now; work doesn’t feel as much like “Work” and I’m in a flow state more of the time. And oh, did I mention that I have gotten a huge amount done and unsnagged some very important projects these past few days? Thanks very much, Mark!”
“The feeling of flow is brilliant, I don’t think I’ve ever worked so comfortably and consistently. It’s amazing when you break down that procratinating feeling!”
“I have my own business, a lot of family commitments and I’m studying a Master’s degree at uni. I can’t help but have too much on my plate, but what I like about AF is that it lets you keep a lot of projects moving along and I’m not feeling so stressed that projects I care about are slipping through the cracks.”
“I have now been trying the AF system since the first day of testing and I am filled with awe and amazement for how well it is working. By doing things “little and often” I have made strides on projects that had languished for months, if not longer. Many minor but still backlogged items have now been tackled and crossed off the list.”
Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 14:38 One effect of the constant cycling through items which is part of the Autofocus system is that this very process reduces resistance to the more difficult tasks.
To obtain this effect it is important that you don’t just look at a page in general and cross a few items off. Instead you need to follow the instructions and move slowly down the page pausing at each item until one “stands out”.
You can actually measure this effect for yourself. As an experiment the next time you put a task on the list that you know you may have trouble doing, mark the task out of 10 for the amount of resistance you feel towards it. Then every time you pass that item again, re-mark it. You will probably find that the resistance gradually lowers.
This is also one of the reasons why items which still have high resistance should be dismissed in Autofocus. There may well be deeper reasons why you are resisting this item. Therefore it’s important to review dismissed items regularly to see if you can identify why each one is causing you to resist it so much.
Monday, January 12, 2009 at 11:09 How one person managed to transform his day using Autofocus!
Thanks to A Reader from Sweden for drawing my attention to this.
Sunday, January 11, 2009 at 14:03 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).
