Get Everything Done

Now that I understand that I don't have to do every single thing on the page that I am willing to do and I am cycling through the pages more than once a day, I am starting to enjoy and benefit from the process.

One thing I find humorous is the tendency to want to know EXACTLY what the rules of AF are when it's almost guaranteed that we will break those rules. If we weren't inclined to break the rules, none of us would struggle with our productivity or with procrastination. From a psychologist's standpoint, the system is actually brilliant is that it is light on rules. How long do you work on a task? As long as you want. Which tasks do you do? The ones you want. It eliminates the inherent rebellion that creates so many of our task management crises. I thought it was funny that I found myself thinking I was cheating by doing the very minimum on a task just so I could cross it off. This is reverse psychology at its finest. Way to go, Mark!

Mark made it clear to use common sense with the system. If my child comes to me bleeding (which unfortunately seems to occur on a daily basis with six children and five of them being boys!), I don't write it on my last list and process my way to it. That's obvious! What I think isn't as obvious to those of us with perfectionistic tendencies is that common sense also applies to non-emergency situations.

For example, I put "return movies" and "return library book" on my list. This morning I was on my way home from the gym and chose to run both of these errands. I was NOT on the pages that contained these tasks. So what! I thought of keeping a separate errands list. The problem with that is I wouldn't be reviewing it regularly and would probably be paying late fees as a result. Keeping these errands on my AF lists kept them in my mind so that I easily thought to combine them efficiently. It worked just as effectively (if not more) than if I had been using a context-based system. By the way, running these errands was even more effective for me because I had also listed "Put movies in the car" as a task. Now when I come to these errands on my list, I will just cross them off. I am sure you could have the same benefits by keeping a true errands list and then adding the task, "Review errands list" to your main AF list.

Some other common sense issues are management of projects and established routines. When I have a big project, I don't list every step of that project on my list. Instead, I just do the first step, cross it off, and re-enter it on the last page. If you really have no idea what the steps in a project are, you could enter "create project plan" as a task. Once you have that plan, you could file it and refer to it every time "Work on project X" comes up on your AF list.

Finally, I have not been messing with my established routines that are clearly working. For example, I don't put "workout" or "unload dishwasher" on my lists as I do these at the same time in the same way every day. What I think AF is for are those tasks that you haven't established an effective management strategy for. Perhaps Mark should make a rule that we must use AF in the way that best furthers our productivity. That's why I'm not using paper and I don't freak out if I do a task that isn't on my current list. The intent of AF is to give you the structured freedom we need to get everything done.

Exactly Mel !

That's a great summing up of what I've found with Autofocus. I stick to the 'rules' as much as I can but I also 'cheat' when it suits me best. Any time/task management system should work with each of us as individuals and what suits one won't always suit another in exactly the same way - take the digital vs paper debate for starters.

For the record I do run a separate Errands list and yes, I have an item called "check Errands list" and this works fine for me. I found that putting all my errands in my standard Autofocus list was frustrating, since every time I scanned a page they were there but I couldn't do anything with them. Now I can check them on a regular basis when it comes up on my list to do so or, if I'm going out, I can scan them anyway.

Sometimes living with someone else causes me to have to do some items out of order, especially when some tasks involve them anyway. So a healthy dose of common sense is what's called for to make any system work. What's so great about Autofocus though is that it takes so little effort to make it flow so beautifully and it feels so good working it...

Totally agree!

Many thanks - so helpful reading others' experiences........inspiring too!

Very helpful posts. I also think AF will suit me better than the systems I've tried before, such as DIT, which I really wanted to implement, but procrastinated my way out of... AF seems better suited to (lazy...) people like me. I'd like to know what Mark think of the following "cheat": if there's an item I know is on page 3 that I feel like doing, do you think it's within the spirit of AF to pick an easy task on page 1 and 2 before moving on to the task I want to do on page 3? This sort of strays from the rules a bit, as I suppose I'm not really going through a page slowly, but just picking an item that I consider easy (more or less from memory, if for instance I know that an item on page 1 is "pay bill x").

As far as I can see it's somewhat within the "realm of AF", but it would be interesting to hear your thoughts, Mark.

I'll take that as "a little rule-bending is ok once in a while", then ;)

Thanks for your reply, Mark!