A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

This is the ‘organizational system’ I mentioned yesterday.

Like so much over the last month, this falls squarely in the “I came across it via twitter somehow” category. You think blogs are ephemeral? Phew.

The full document describing all of this is available at Mark Forster’s site, here: AutoFocus System

But I quite recommend watching this video interview. There are a couple details in Mark’s (merely 6 page) write up, but you get the gist of it here:

(And I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t comment on how irrepressibly adorable the girl interviewing him is.)

For a couple years I’ve managed about half a dozen false starts with David Allen’s “Getting Things Done.” But I really just get lost in the administrivia of it. There are too many steps for me to get rolling without it being in my way in the meantime. I expect that once the habits were formed that I’d be able to go with it. But right now the barrier to entry is too annoying, so Autofocus suits me wonderfully for now.

The most important thing about this, the reason that it lit my head up is that it ALMOST looks too trivial to be useful. Which, almost immediately after I thought it I realized is one of those great signs of accessibility.
(It echoes exactly what Robert Martin said about Test Driven Development in a moment that was one of the great A HA!s of my life.)

So far I’m a couple days in to using it and I’m still at the stage where the speed at which I’m adding things to the list far outstrips my completion rate. But that’s primary just backlog. I’m now at a few solid pages of items and, until it winnows down a bit, I’m going to be going over the whole thing at once, rather than one page at a time. Otherwise I’d be striking out and re-entering 90+% of the items on every pass, which is just a waste of paper.

I do want to add some meta data to it. I haven’t figured out yet the best way to do that. Should I have a completion date? Would it really serve any purpose? How about “tasks to be done at the computer” as opposed to other contexts?

My mind also wants to isolate, batch, abstract and chain tasks (can’t do “Take laundry to Laundromat” until “bag laundry” is done.) Does it matter? I suspect it might not. Just put both down. One you can’t do right now and one you can.

So far so good.