Get Everything Done

Hi everyone

after several days using AF, I'm still uncomfortable with routine tasks; I see myself back to DIT for some routine actions / tasks (morning routine, end of the day routine, the Will Do List) plus a combination of 'MITs of the day' I want to do first things in the morning (Must Important Things, I absolute want to do in the day, whatever my feelings are about)

Then, I use AF for the rest of the tasks (call a colleague, book a plane, Discuss that project with Mr Bean ...)

Therefore my process becomes the following:
* morning routines (including MITs): 90 minutes
* AF for 'unscheduled' tasks
* Night routine (including tomorrow MITs definition): max. 30 minutes

Does that makes sense? Am I missing one of the "wooah" effect of AF?

Absolutely the same here. I'm doing my, what you call "MITs" before doing the rest of my tasks with AF at the moment. I'm missing the effect of getting more tasks done and the "whoaa"-effect, too. But it seems that it works for most people. Or it's just an increased productivity that is due to the fact of setting up a new system.

I'm using AF exclusively and I'm finding I'm either not getting all my daily tasks done or they are getting done (very) late in the day, so I'm not too happy about that. On the other hand, I am getting through more 'difficult' tasks. I'm tempted to use your set-up, Pascal, but I better give the full AF another few weeks first to see if things improve.

I've found that some of my routine tasks have not been getting done but have felt ok about that. In those cases it has prompted me to look at why, whether they need doing, or if there is a better way. Sometimes there is a better way, sometimes it is just that have not needed doing - or at least not so frequently - and sometimes it is just the fact that the system is still "settling down" and has a lot more backlog items than I would anticipate in a few months time ..........

To the best of my knowledge nothing important has been missed .........

Christine

I agree with you that some routine tasks don't really need to be done daily and the system does catch everything eventually, so no stress there. I've got a problem with a couple of tasks - studying Spanish for instance. I spread that out to three or four short sessions a day, rather than having one big (tiring) session. That's the kind of thing you do need to do on a daily basis and I'm finding that some days with AF I might not get all the sessions done or spread out enough. I'm thinking of taking that out of the system and making 'appointments' for those sessions. Other than that, I don't really care how often I check my email, say. Some other tasks though, must be done on a certain day and I'm also finding it difficult to sync them to a suitable time because they may be on a different page. Maybe I should try cycling through the pages faster, but that might mean doing extra tasks to get to the page(s) I want. I'm still not really comfortable with AF for those kind of tasks.

Hi Kevin

Scheduling is still an option - Mark references retaining a separate schedule/diary for appointments and some things fit well with that. You can also link routines, for example you may decide to check email whenever you have a coffee break for example. With something specific like language learning you may want to just add smaller tasks, such as "increase Spanish vocabulary" or "write my next AF post in Spanish!" there's no reason why you can't several Spanish items on each page - it will give you a lot of choice....

You could also check out the following link for some more comments re tasks.

http://www.markforster.net/forum/post/624733

Thanks Christine, that's good advice (apart from writing my next AF post in Spanish!). I'll add your link to my AF list :-)

What I do with items which have a "hard" deadline (but not a certain time on the respective day) is to write the due date right of the check box and highlight it.