Autofocus 4 Q&A: My little personal assistant

I got some questions recently on how I use Autofocus 4 for time management and I thought I’d answer them here.

Are you using pen and paper or a computer? 

I’m using pencil and paper.  (For some reason, pen doesn’t  feel right for AF4)  My paper is a simple composition book with ruled lines.  I divide each page into two columns.   I connect crossed out items with vertical lines to make it easier to spot unfinished items.

Do you have a separate notebook for personal/home tasks?

Yes.  Though I have considered otherwise and I have a friend who uses just one and he likes it.   I prefer having two because I don’t like to mix work and family.   I do, however, bring my home book to work so that I can write down ideas that need to be done at home (and vice-versa).  I would probably keep just one if I was self-employed.  

Do you find that Mark’s recommendation to ignore task priority works for you? 

Yes.  However, I’m still getting over feeling nervous about it.   What I find important is to keep the discipline.  One of the rules is to scan the list before I start acting on it.  This let’s my intuition kick in before I decide what needs to be done.  That way I don’t forget about important things.     A very valuable feature of AF4 is that it highlights the stuff I have not touched in a long time and it begs me, pleads with me, cajoles me into doing something about it.  About half the time, I simply highlight the item so I can forget about it and move on.  The other half of the time, I force myself to do 5 minutes of work on it so I can move it to the front of the list.  Oddly enough, this feels quite satisfying and I am surprisingly productive when I do it.

Along the same lines, what do you do when a task comes up that should get addressed soon/immediately? 

This is where the philosophy really kicks in.  The first thing I observe is that 95% of everything that is “urgent” is really not as urgent as we think.   Case in point- when I got these questions, my impulse was to answer them immediately because I had all these ideas about them.  Then I settled down and focused on the rules.  I wrote down a task to answer the letter and finally took it on when the time was right (after some more pressing tasks were completed).    For those rare, truly pressing tasks, I find that as long as I keep the rule of scanning the list, my intuition forces me to work on them.    For instance, I got an email this morning saying that an output of mine was broken and it was urgent to fix it before an 11am meeting.  I wrote it on my list and then went back to scanning my email.  Then I scanned the AF4 list, did a few items on my backlog that I felt needed to be done, and then my brain started screaming at me to do this one item.  I couldn’t even concentrate on what I was reading.   I got it done way ahead of schedule and was able to feel very satisfied in all the work I had accomplished.

So, what seems to me to be the most wonderful thing about AF4 is this discovery that I have a personal assistant to help me focus on what’s important.   So far this has not let me down and my confidence in “my little personal assistant” is increasing.