AutoFocus 2 – Experience so far
AutoFocus review
On June 27, Mark Forster released his AutoFocus 2 which is a followup to his AutoFocus time management system released earlier this year.
AutoFocus is described on Mark's site and I did an earlier comparison of it to David Allen's GTD here. AF2 is designed to resolve some of the issues that have been observed about AF. Mark describes these well on his site. This quick article is my description of my experience with AF2 after the first 10 days.
Overall I'm very pleased with AF2. It has really re-engaged my use of the system. I found my use of AF flagging a little bit in the few weeks before AF2 came out. I think this was partly due to having split my lists into a Home and Work list. With AF2 I am back to a single list. While I initially really liked the "closed list" idea of working on a single page until there were no items that were standing out, it became difficult to iterate through the list fast enough to deal with urgent issues. In AF2 you work backwards through the list and after each task you jump to the end again so it allows very rapid progress as items come up. I find that this makes it difficult to get back to items earlier in the list though. So far I've solved this by making one linear pass through the list each day, where I start at the end and just keep working back. Then I follow the normal rules the rest of the day. This seems to work well and allows reasonable progress on all parts of the list, but also allows me to make quick progress on important items and things that are important that come up during the day.
The other thing I really like are the new rules for dismissing items. It becomes pretty clear what items will get dismissed "tomorrow" and almost every day I have dismissed one task. On one occassion it was a task I really should have done, but just didn't get to and it was reasonably urgent (but really dreaded doing). In every other case, the dismissal has removed a task that really isn't that important, or something that is important, but not for a while. These new dismissal rules are great and help get pages cleaned up much faster than before.
When I started AF2 I threw away my old list and started with a brand new notebook. In 10 days I've got 12 pages, 2 of which are closed, and many of the pages have just a few items remaining. My pages currently hold 26 tasks, compared to the 40 my prior notebook hold. I find I like having a bit more room to write the tasks. In comparing my current statistics to my earlier experience with AF after 5 weeks, it appears that I'm moving a bit faster and closing pages faster as well.
The best way to compare AF and AF2 is they both seem to build incredible momentum to getting tasks done, but with AF2 there is more fluidity and it feels easier to naturally follow through on important tasks whereas with AF it often felt as if I sometimes needed to do unimportant tasks in favor of things I knew intuitively were more important. As stated earlier, I think the biggest problem now is how to really handle important things that aren't at the head of the list. I do believe that the key to resolving all these issues is to really internalize and follow the notion that your intuition is the guide and determines what "stands out".
If you are using AF2, what is your experience?
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