Get Everything Done

First of all, I would like to thank Mark Forster for the way he is
conducting the beta test of Autofocus. His ideas have been really
invaluable to me. And I would also like to thank the other testers and
commenters on this forum, whose discussions helped me solve some
doubts that I have faced in the last days.

A brief introduction if I may, and enough of lurking around. I am now
an PhD student in Astronomy. I found GTD when I was starting having
problems writing my Master's thesis and was feeling overwhelmed. My
main problem was the stressful feeling I had in the evenings and
weekends -- when I was having fun, I had that thought in the back of
my mind that I should, in fact, be working on my thesis. GTD made
sense for some months. But I was soon stressed with my never-ending
lists.

Then I found DIT, which gave me a great sense of relief by allowing me
to call it a day. My problem with DIT, like others have mentioned, was
the fact that I was always trying to cut down on my tomorrow's
list. So, it ended up being a not very fun list. And I resented that
-- when will I have time to allow fun and creative and some personal
projects on my list?

AF to the rescue. I just started this week. I signed up on the first
week, but it turned out I had a trip then; second week I had a major
personal problem and decided I'd take the week off. This week is the
week of the truth!

So, I took the leap of faith. I started AF with a clean slate. I
bought a notebook -- still not working very well, but I will post
about this in a moment on this same thread, as this post is already
long enough. My week started with my dealing with the red tape in
France, which always makes me exhasuted to no end. But I was already
fine on Tuesday, hanging on to my AF list. Yesterday I spent most of
the day away from the office, finishing off a project. But today I
already picked up where I left off.

So, it is great so far. More relaxed, less paranoia. :) To finish off
this post, AF reminded me of something I listened to at Radiolab. This
episode called Choice talks about a guy who loses the ability to
listen to his gut feeling. He is all rational. But he cannot decide on
what box of cereal he should buy. Turns out Spock-like people are
terrible at making decisions. And I was proud of being one of those!
Anyway, AF is really helping me to trust my gut feelings again. If you
want to listen to the segment where this is discussed, it is here:

***********
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/11/14/segments/113278

Overcome By Emotion

Instinct or analysis? Wouldn't things be easier if we could get
emotion out of the way and let rational analysis lead? Except that so
often, that gut feeling turns out to be right. We explore both
extremes. Antoine Bechara, a psychology professor at USC, tells us
about the case of Elliot, an accountant who, after having a tumor
removed from his brain, became entirely rational.
***********

I'll be back on this thread in a few minutes.

I see the last post is a bit hard to read because of the line breaks,. I will try to mend things on this one.

First topic I wanted to comment was the notebook choice. Although I prefer text files on my computer for many things (e.g., GTD and DIT where partially implemented with them), I just could not see how a digital system would be any better than pen and paper. Oh, note: I use a pencil -- not a mechanical pencil, not a pen -- a simple and soft pencil. I get distracted when the ink on a page is different, and I dislike mechanical pencils, so pencils are always my first choice.

My first attempt (week #1) was to recycle a small Moleskine diary from last year, as it had many blank pages. It had 19 lines, and the lines were too small to write things. As someone already said, AF, to me, requires more writing space than DIT, because some tasks hang around for more time so it is nicer to have them more spelled out.

I then searched for a A5 notebook. I ended up with A5 graph paper notebook. I really prefer lined paper, but I thought it would be OK, as I have been using graph paper on and off. Pros: because the boxes are smallish, there are many lines on each page. I use 37 lines, but there are, in fact, 41. Had it been 42, I would have seriously considered filling out all of them. :) But I leave 4 blank lines on top of each bage to mark when a page is closed.

So, first day (week #3, week #2 I was off work) I started listing my taks, line by line. It got really croweded, even with my small-ish writing, so I thought: why not simply skip a line between entries? That way, it was much easier to read and see what had been crossed. The problem was that I had then only 19 lines per page, as I was skipping every other line.

I realised this would not work -- I saw it myself with the small moleskine, and I also read Mark's reasons to recommend 30-40 lines per page. So back to using all lines I went. I also felt better about not wasting half of my notebook skipping lines.

But it got very croweded again, and I noticed today, as I have a lot of completed items (yay!, but still none dismissed), I was not notincing some items because of how croweded the pages have become.

So, I got a A4 lined-paper pad (Rhodia, top-flip) I had lying around and will test it. It is has 36 lines. I will keep using both, as I am very lazy to transfer the items on the A5 notebook to the A4.

A nice side-effect I noticed: my writing is getting clearer now, as I am getting more practice during the day.

Last comment after my almost-a-week experiment with AF. I had a great feeling today when I cycled back to my last page. There I had listed many routine things, but I had also rewritten tasks on which I worked a bit today, and had been resisting starting for some time. You know, the last page, the open page, where most of the action is supposed to be, is a great motivation to keep using AF! "Look at what you have done today! Way to go!", it screams at me. I hope it keeps going this way. :)

Natalia,

thanks for sharing your experiences. Very interesting to read.

Thank you so much for your amazing post

Fantastic to hear about your positive experience with AF! The last page's visual reminder of achievements and ongoing tasks sounds like https://magic8balls.org/ a powerful motivator. Keep up the momentum and enjoy the productivity journey!