Get Everything Done

Mark--thanks for this. So on paper, when a task is up for review, and you indicate such with yellow high-lighting yellow, what do you do with it if you do go ahead and complete it? Green over the yellow??

Don't mean to get too crazy-detailed here, but I am a paper-person and well, perhaps others are a little stuck here as well :~D

As I said, I don't think Mark uses a green highlighter for done tasks, he just crosses them out with his pen. So I guess he would cross out the highlighted items.

Mike wrote:
>>>With the basic "common sense rule" you could certainly do items out of order if they were urgent. <<<

One of the nice things about AF4 is that it almost totally eliminates the need for the "common sense rule". You can just follow the rules and still "jump" straight to an urgent task that just landed on your lap. The only times this wouldn't work are

(1) ... when you are in the process of dealing with highlighted items. If you just abandon them, then the rules dictate that they are deleted. In this case you could just "suspend" the rules till next time around.

and

(2) ... if you are on a pass through your Closed List / Backlog and haven't yet taken action on anything. You would end up highlighting the whole lot if you jump to your Open List right then. Of course you could suspend the rules in this case, too, or you could just take a quick action on one task, and then jump to your new task, and you'd be following all the rules.

At least, that's how it seems to me. :-)

Beth, what you are missing is that in AF4 those highlighted tasks are NEVER done. When you come back to them on the next pass you either delete them entirely or copy them to the end of the open list. THEN, perhaps (hopefully?) they will get done. But in place ... they are never done once highlighted. They must be reentered to be done.

mike--
oh.
missed that piece.
got it.

thnx

mark-you can ignore above query.

beth

Mike:

<< Beth, what you are missing is that in AF4 those highlighted tasks are NEVER done. When you come back to them on the next pass you either delete them entirely or copy them to the end of the open list. THEN, perhaps (hopefully?) they will get done. But in place ... they are never done once highlighted. They must be reentered to be done. >>

Nonetheless, in Mark's demo there is a difference between a highlighted task and a striked through highlighted task. The former needs to be reviewed the next time you get there, the latter has already been reviewed. In my PDF I don't strike trough done tasks, but highlight them green. That confused Beth.

Thank you Andreas this was very helpful for understanding the system. Must have taken you ages.

Monday was a holiday here in the US, so I didn't start AF4 till Tuesday.

I don't want to use a highlighter. So here is what I am doing.

1. I use Post-It (plastic "tape flags") on the first and last pages of my list.
2. I put a dot (.) on the left margin of the item I am currently working on.
3. I put an "x" on the left margin of an item that I decide I no longer want to do (call this "cancelled).
4. I put a vertical line on the left margin of an item that I have completed.
5. I put a horizontal line (-) on the left margin of the backlog items marked for dismissal. On the next (and final) pass through the backlog, I bisect that horizontal line with a vertical line (and, possibly, re-add the item at the bottom of the list).

A completed page will have a continuous vertical line down the left hand margin, with the exception of the x's in front of the canceled items.

I have had a lot of discretionary time during these first two days of AF4. And I like it. The real test will be whether I can force myself to work for a moment on an backlogged item in order to reach an urgent item in my open list.

Andreas,

I just wanted to thank you for your demo. I have been following along since AF1 and sincerely appreciate your effort here. (Of course, I also appreciate Mark sharing all of his efforts along the way!)

I have actually taken the format that you used, and adopted it for my AF4 lists. That is, I am using my notebook horizontally and have 4 columns of 22 rows to work with. It is cutting down on the page-flipping and it adds to my enjoyment of AF4!

Cheers!
Tony

Completed Pages:
Something I have been doing for every time-related journal forever is to cut the upper corners diagonally once I am done with that page. Makes it very easy to flip to the "last open page".
Works like a champ.

Thank you for the clarity of your graphic demo of AF4.

On page 491-492: for me the concepts and the text box for this part of AF4 seem the most complex to understand.

On page 571: in the text box, "end of closed list", should, I think, be "end of open list".

Thanks for all your work.

Andreas, thanks a lot for your effort - this explains everything very very clearly.

the link does not work anymore. can somebody direct me to a working link. thanks

I happened to have a copy lying about among my downloads, and here is a link to the Onedrive folder: See if it works for you.

http://1drv.ms/b/s!AmgB94aBh8gclHhK8n5XHggl5-hZ

kjell: thank you! thank you!

Mark:

Does Squarespace 5 allow custom JavaScript? If yes, I could write you some to recognize https links in comments and forum posts, if you'd like.

Everyone:

In addition to Kjell's OneDrive share, I re-hosted the PDF here: http://andreasmaurer.net/public/data/af4-demo.pdf

Unfortunately, autofocus.cc expired a few years ago and is currently in the hands of Chinese domain grabber, as far as I can tell from whois data. I'd recommend replacing the link in the original post of this thread, since it's unclear how safe it is to visit the site.

Mark:

<< There is no way that I am aware of of using custom Javascript or anything else in the Comments. >>

Oh, it wouldn't be specifically for the comments, it would be a general option to add custom javascript, probably to the site header. To make sure it works on the comments would be the job of the script.

<< Sorry, I'm not clear where the link you are referring to is to be found. >>

I'm referring to the link in the first post of this forum thread, which is almost 9 years old - namely http://autofocus.cc/public/data/af4-demo.pdf - that has stopped working a few years ago, which now caused this thread to rise back to the top. My suggestion that you edit this post and replace the link with Kjell's or my own, or - probably the best long term solution - host the file yourself. The same link is also used in the AF4 instructions blog post, equally broken there.