Get Everything Done

"Dismissal" of items has frequently been criticized as unworkable by those who haven't tried Autofocus yet. It certainly seemed scary to me when I started.

A common response to critics of the dismissal rule is to point out that dismissed items are not destroyed; they are merely set aside, capable of being reanimated at some indefinite later time.

One response that I haven't seen yet, though, is the fact that Autofocus itself dismisses almost nothing.

Say what? Let me give you an example--perhaps you'll see it my way.

Suppose I put "Clean out desk drawer" into Autofocus. Twenty-four other items get put onto the same page with this one. So that means I am guaranteed to evaluate "Clean out desk drawer" before or after I work on each one of the other items on the page.

Let's say that I work on twenty of the twenty-five items on this page before nothing else on the page stands out for me. This means that I have looked at "Clean out desk drawer" twenty different times, probably over a period of a week or more, and not once have I seen fit to even BEGIN this task. Remember that all I need to do to keep this item going is to take one gum wrapper (or whatever) out of the desk and throw it away, then rewrite this task on a later page. For whatever reason, I haven't done this.

So Autofocus requires that I mark the item as "dismissed" now. But Autofocus hasn't dismissed the item; Autofocus is merely reflecting reality. In fact, I was the one who dismissed the item. In fact, I dismissed it twenty different times, every time I looked at that item and said, "Uhhh, not right now". The dismissal rule reflects reality back to us: "For whatever reason, good or bad, you aren't working on this item. It's distracting--take it away. Something in you, in it, or in the situation needs to change before this item should come back."

I can imagine pathological situations where an urgent situation and an unlucky combination of items on a particular page might cause Autofocus to dismiss items it shouldn't. If that ever does happen, though, it's easy to see the problem and fix it all within the context of the standard Autofocus rules.

In the main, Autofocus never has the opportunity to dismiss items. That's because whether or not they are on our lists, we have dismissed those items first.

This long post I understand. Great point. This is why it works for me. I have 40-50 lines per page (depending on my penmanship) . If I ain't got to a task after that many iterations through the page, I am in denial if I think I am going to do *anything* about it soon.

I think the point is right , and well explained, but the arithmetic is slightly out.

On a single pass you may well do several items. For example, if you have 30 tasks on a list after the first pass, you might do:

Pass Tasks worked
------ -----------------
2_____10
3_____7
4_____5
5_____3
6_____4
7_____dismiss 1

So you've mentally discarded it 5 times before finally biting the bullet.

Pedantic? Possibly.

Anyway, nice post, making the key point very well.

Regards,

Will