Get Everything Done

Quick survey:

What times are you allocating toward AF usage?

All day? Evenings also? Just at work? Just the weekends? 24/7?

As some have already noted in Do It Tomorrow, working with a closed list allowed you to feel satisfied and have a feeling of 'doneness'. With AF it's up to you to decide what is 'enough', since you don't predetermine what is a days work. I wonder if people are setting their own boundaries (like working till 5pm and no further, or if some are going about it more in terms of free style, by stopping when you feel like it.

It occurred to me that it's quite easy to never stop working on your list, in other words...pretty much spending all day with it. Are people experiencing any downsides to working continously? Or have some created rules to determine when to stop working?

And what's the first thing you think about when you wake up? Is it AF/tasks? Or does AF reduce compulsive thoughts like these? Do you carry your notebook to the bathroom, the kitchen, your friends house?

Would love to know how AF is impacting lifestyle and work habits, specifically to do with time usage!

Hi Peter

I'm on holiday-at-home so ***plenty*** of time to spend on my AF list :) It's certainly working for me, but the telling time will be when I get back to work.

Yes, I do find it hard to stop looking at my list, but that's no surprise for a fairly high scoring obsessive-compulsive-perfectionist! However, I also have nice, 'me-time' things on AF so they are getting done too...

By the way, I'm using it predominantly for home with just over a page for work. Getting through a large backlog of domestic items which were abandoned when I changed career last summer. AF has come at just the right time for me now I've settled in to my new job.

My work is 'self-contained' but I do have to produce a portfolio in nine months time so will be using AF to make sure I'm on schedule.

Hi Peter,

I'm finding AF quite addictive ('I'll just do one more task'), which has been tiring to some extent - though less tiring than worrying about things that need to be done :<). I'm generally working my AF list during the morning at work (I go out on visits in the afternoon) and no more than 2 hours in the evening for home tasks.

In some sense, as long as you put everything on the list, there is no allocating time to Autofocus, there's just using AF to do what you want to do. I used to feel like reading was something I got to do when I was done the higher priority things. You can imagine how little reading I've been doing. After reading about Mark putting his books on his list, I added a task for read one short story from a book I'm in the middle of. I read a story last night, wrote "Read next story" at the end of my list," and checked off the other instance. Now I'm finding a way to interleave the important things with the important and urgent things much more than I used to.

I'm pretty much only using AF at weekends. Anything more was just too much pressure with a full time job outside the home. I hope, Mark, that you put some detail in your upcoming book about the failures here. I think that AF requires a fair amount of processing time. For me, I just don't have that discretionary time. I liked the current initiative aspect of DIT. There's not a lot of spare time left after the current initiative I'm afraid. I don't think that AF suits people who work outside the home, people who are employed rather than self-employed or working from home.

I use it like MF... of course, not so well! ;-)

My usage is like Mark's. Actually, my problem is not wanting to do my must-do routine tasks (e.g., make dinner). I'd rather be working my lists! What I'm trying to do now is say, "As soon as you're done with these routine chores, you can work on AF as a reward." It IS very rewarding, too.

So far, I use it all day at work, I need to build my personal list and I have a personal project in mind as an experiment. I want to use AF to manage a project which is an ebook I am writing and planning to build a web based sales project around.

Gerry

Wow, an interesting question! And some telling replies as well. It never crossed my mind that someone wouldn't try to allot "as much as possible" time to AF.

Initially, I set out to use it (only) at work, for all my work. This didn't work at all, b/c it was easily overthrown by emergencies (I have a lot of them, honestly!) and scheduled team work (lots of 30 min to 2 h deadlines in a tight weekly schedule, which AF doesn't seem to cater easily).

Then I tried to use an emergencies list (at first, a post-it note and later, a small separate steno pad) in conjunction with AF. Result: Emergencies and scheduled/mundane stuff began to completely rule my day.

I haven't used it at home so far. I hope to get it working there starting this weekend. It might work better there as almost all of that time is discretionary, in sharp contast to my work. Problem is, there's so little of that time. Let's see how it goes.

BTW, watching Gerry's project re ebook develop might be especially interesting, since I've never seen a concrete project to be managed by AF here before.

--
Alex

I use it for just about everything. I pick it up and start going at it, pretty much first thing in the morning, and keep at it throughout the day and into the evening. I take it with me to meetings and add action items as they arise during the meeting. I take it with me when I am talking over the day with my wife, since we have a large and busy family and there's always new tasks that come up in these daily discussions.

I find it's a great stress reliever, and I don't feel at all like AF has taken over my life. On the contrary, I feel like it's helped me take control of my life back from the overwhelm and chaos that was always threatening to knock me down.

Also, I've found that many "leisure" activities were really just attempts to escape from the feeling of overwhelm -- "I can't take it anymore! I've got to check out and vegetate for a while!" Well, that just doesn't seem to happen as much anymore. Instead of skipping around the Internet or casual reading, my "leisure" is more focused, more aligned with my goals, more aligned with my family's needs and wants, and, well, a lot more fun and relaxing!

Pretty amazing what this little tool can do, isn't it?

I find that I am quite happy to work with my lists in all of my discretionery time and interestingly am finding that the things I am "forgetting" to do are, like Mel, eating (until my stomach reminds me!) and things I used as procrastinators, such as watching TV. The problem of AF for me is now quite serious - I have created a major backlog of recorded TV (shall I watch x or work on my lists? The lists win!) :-)

What I have also found though is some samll pockets of discretionery time I didn't know I had. For example if I am sitting in the car waiting to collect someone I can write out some items in my travel notebook, or draft a letter or two, or plan a project. That time would have definately just been wasted pre AF.