Get Everything Done

Steve,
When I was struggling with GTD and I was forcing to somehow make GTD work with MLO, I saw your post about DIT and life improved tremendously. And, I thank you for that. In fact, I have used your lengthy explanations on setting up MLO to really become more productive. Like you, I had a great difficulty trying to get important stuff done. Didn't get a sense of where I was and what needs to be done daily with GTD.

Although DIT was far superior to GTD in getting stuff done, I started realizing that with DIT I couldn't see the forest for the trees (at least for me). I was working around it by keeping a "master" list and transferring it appropriately to the closed list daily. This was to ensure that I was not always in the reactive mode and I dealt with things that were important to me daily. Autofocus has been a great middle ground for me. I am currently using Autofocus as it is spelt out by Mark and I am finding it to be brilliant.

But, you could perhaps use DIT along with Autofocus. This is how I envisioned how I would use Autofocus initially. Keep Autofocus as the "master list" but create a working closed list daily from the multiple pages when you plan your next day. By this what you are doing is giving yourself a day of buffer between Autofocus list and closed list. You may cycle through all the pages of Autofocus over longer period of time than people who use plain Autofocus. Update Autofocus list at the end of the day. But when you plan for the next day, go though Autofocus list and ensure that there is at least one item per page in your Closed list. If you don't pick at least one item on a page, use the page Dismissal rule. This does a couple of things. For one, it keeps your daily structure intact so you feel in control. But, it also forces you to consider items in the master list (now in Autofocus) that you may not consider if you let the DIT work by itself. What Autofocus does best (which doesn't happen automatically with GTD or DIT) is that you have to face the items that you have not dealt with for a certain time period and make a decision about it. I procrastinate a lot but only with certain items. I have had to own up to this and make a decision on what I needed to do about it. Dismiss or do it. This in essence has helped me overcome some of my issues.

Like I mentioned, when I read about Autofocus my immediate thought was to merge Autofocus with DIT as I was quite happy with DIT's workings. But, I decided to stick with vanilla style and change if I don't find this working well. I must say, Autofocus has helped me in very subtle ways - specifically in my procrastination habit. I write this in the hope that it may be of some help.

I think your suggestion is quite reasonable. A good adaptation.