Peace of Mind Organizing

Autofocus 2 to the rescue

30 June 2009

I’m back from my husband’s family reunion at a lovely mountain resort in Pennsylvania. We had such a nice time. There were over 100 people at the reunion, all of them lovely. We drove the 700 miles to the reunion site, spending a night on the road each direction. It was so nice to get away. I barely thought about work.

We’re back now and it’s great to be home. But now I have to face all the tasks and responsibilities I was able to forget about for basically the last nine days.

This morning as I faced down the >150 messages in my inbox and an extremely long task list, I started to feel overwhelmed. As I’ve mentioned before, I love the Autofocus time management system invented by Mark Forster. It does have one fairly major flaw, however. It doesn’t easily handle urgent items. As a result, urgent tasks were handled “off list,” so to speak. In other words, I’d put out fires and not actually look at my Autofocus list and use its methodology. In the time leading up to my two mini-vacations everything seemed urgent, my Autofocus list had been sorely neglected.

Mark Forster recognized this problem with urgent tasks in Autofocus and has been working on solving it. This weekend, while I was away, Mark issued a major revision of the system, which he calls Autofocus 2 (or AF2).

Today’s the perfect day to test it out. My whole day is free of appointments. I have a pretty desperate desire to get caught up and become reacquainted with what’s going on in my business. So I’m trying out AF2, using the AF1 list I’ve had going since January 5 of this year.

The new method has me working the list from bottom to top and asking me to act on (or dismiss) older tasks at the top of the list. So far, it’s working nicely. I’m getting quite a bit done. The few items that really needed to be completed today are completed, as is some older stuff. It’s going to take a little getting used to, but I think I’m going to like it. Once again, I salute the genius of Mark Forster.

My email inbox is well on its way to my goal of reducing it to 10 or fewer action-related emails. I’ve reacquainted myself with what I need to be doing and thinking about. I’m getting stuff done. And I’m feeling more in control. Thank you, AF2!

I may even unpack today!

Tagged with: autofocus, control, mark forster, to-do list

Comments