Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Procrastinators united --- ready for a joined test-drive of the autofocus-system?

I've been telling people about Mark Forster's amazing autofocus-system (http://www.markforster.net/autofocus-system/) since I heard about it one or two months ago. The basic idea is to write down everything there is to do in a notebook, and then walk through it page by page and use your gut feeling to pick from any page just the things you'd like to do, and work on them as long as you want. It looked very attractive, but somehow I didn't put it into practice.

This monday one of my coaching-colleagues from my coaching-training challenged me by saying something like: "I've looked at it, but I don't really think it would work for me." I asked her if she tried it, and she said no. That somehow made me check it out again, and I decided to try it out, so I might base my enthusiasm on some actual experience ... She now calls me "really stubborn" ;-) ...

What shall I say? I finished day 2 now and enjoy it tremendeously ... I'm enjoying to pick any next item from my to-do-list (which has grown to six pages already) and work on it. And I make great progress (already 57 items crossed out in two days!), even with quite some tasks I've been not doing for weeks or months ... Very nice feeling at the end of the day: it's not exhausting at all, because I do the whole time things I like to do (maybe I just thrive on it because I'm a Feldenkrais-practitioner ...).

Anyone joining in a test-drive for 10 days?
So here's my suggestion: anyone out there who wants to give it a try, too? How about just joining in and putting your experiences into the comments, so we can learn about how it works for different people. I intend to do it at least for 10 days, but if it continues to work that great I'm probably not gonna drop it at all :-) ...

What to do?
  • Read the instructions at http://www.markforster.net/autofocus-system/.
  • I prepared a little simple Word-Template with the appropriate number of lines and the summary of the instructions at the margins. If you want a copy of it, just drop me a line at coaching-playground@gmx-topmail.de, and I'm happy to share it with you.
  • Leave a comment below if you're joining in.
  • Start!
  • Check in here to report your progress from time to time.
Anyone wants to join in? :-)

11 comments:

  1. Klingt interessant, Dein Experiment... bin am Überlegen, ob ich mich Dir anschließe. Gestern habe ich schon bei Mark Foster nachgelesen. Der Ansatz alles nur niederzuschreiben und mit Hilfe der Vernunft und der Vorliebe das nächste Aktivwerden auszusuchen hat was Menschliches

    ReplyDelete
  2. "Was Menschliches" find ich super auf den Punkt gebracht! :-)
    Ich bin auch heute noch & wieder begeistert ...
    Ein paar Leute haben mich angemailt, vielleicht schreibt ja hier auch mal jemand was von seinen Erfahrungen ...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Who's on board? Several people sent me private messages and jumped onto the bandwagon. I'm delighted!!!
    How is it going? I'm still enthusiastic ... did a good mix of important things and long-postponed things and inspirational things yesterday and today.

    While talking to some people I heard: "I wouldn't find so many things for my to-do-list". Well congrats! Then you don't need it! :-) But when investigating further I heard: "Oh, I have items on my list that have a parallel sublist (like "call people on the telephone list")". Or: "I do lots of things, but I don't write onto the list".

    Well ... I put very simple and single things onto the list, like "call person XY because of ...", or "empty the dishwasher". Like everything that jumps in between to my mind to be done, I put it onto the list to not get distracted from the thing I'm working on. And that might be simple, single things - yes.

    But it puts me in control ;-) -- Mark Forster differentiates between "Thought – Decision - Action" and "Stimulus – Response: (http://www.markforster.net/do-it-tomorrow-chapter-one/ -- and getting out of simple "stimulus - response"-mode might be an important aspect of it.

    I like it if it's a concrete step of action on the list, and not a huge, abstract goal. When I have finished that concrete step, a next step might result from it, yes. I might even plan these steps ahead, but there's no use in writing down all the consecutive steps onto my list before they can be done, because something else has to be done before ...

    What are your experiences so far? Does it work? And: How does it work best for you?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi - ich arbeite auch (mal mehr, mal weniger) mit Autofocus. Ich werde mal beobachten, wie die nächste Woche für mich läuft - und dann in Frankfurt berichten. Grüße! W.

    ReplyDelete
  5. @Anonymous/W. of Feb 2: Ich freue mich schon auf den Bericht in Frankfurt!!! :-)

    Summary of weekend:
    I was away for the weekend in the Netherlands, enjoying dancing tango :-) ... and I intentionally left my to-do-list (and my laptop!) at home. And that felt great, because I had the feeling to have made great progress during the first 5 days of my little experiment, and that made it very easy to take some "time off" just for fun, and not feel guilty about it at all! :-)

    It was nice to learn from some people I met at the weekend that they had noticed about my test-drive and told me their experience.

    Having returned home I'm looking forward to continue working on my list tomorrow morning - I sort of have to force myself *not* to look at it already tonight ...

    ReplyDelete
  6. Sooo ... yesterday was packed with various appointments and I didn't have much time nor energy to continue with the to-do-list (still somewhat tired from the tango weekend ;-)...). But to keep up the moral I picked one rather irrelevant single task and did that.

    Today I picked up the thread and continued with the list and managed to get some things done. In fact I stumble upon the task "write a new comment in the blog" which I do right now :-) ...

    Maybe some statistics :-) to finish this comment ...
    Day No of test-drive: 7 (plus 2 weekend days-off)
    Pages on my to-do-list so far: 11
    Items/page: 24
    Total # of items: 250
    Items worked on (crossed out): 125
    Average Items worked on per day: 18

    There's more on my list and the day isn't over yet ... :-)

    Is anyone else willing to share own experiences so far?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hm ich hab so ein file auf meiner Festplatte, wo ich seit Jahren to-dos reinschreibe. Ich verwende zum Abarbeiten das System von 37signals.com, bzw was sie über Feature-Requests von Kunden schreiben (in der Software-Entwicklung).

    "Standing out" heisst dann, dass die Idee bzw das to-do mehrmals kommt, immer wieder. Und dann wird es wichtig.

    Blöd ist, dass da viele Sachen drin stehen wie "Chinesisch lernen", oder "Japanisch lernen", oder "Feldenkrais iPhone app" uvm. Jedes dieser to-dos braucht Monate bzw Jahre intensiver Arbeit. Sind auch kürzere to-dos drin. Müsste ich wohl runterbrechen. Neues to-do! :-)

    Aber interessante Idee, das so zu veröffentlichen. Ich mache das also schon irgendwie schon seit langem. Wundere mich, was der Unterschied zu normalen to-do ist. Aber vermutlich der Julia Cameron "Way of the Artist" approach ... und dass es von Mark Foster kommt, nehm ich mal an, der will och n bisschen was mit verdienen, nehm ich mal an ;-)

    liebe Grüsse

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Alfons,

      ja, das stimmt wohl: Chinesisch lernen oder Japanisch lernen dauern etwas länger. Wobei ich bzgl. Sprachen ja ein großer Fan von Michel Thomas bin - da gibt's auch Chinesisch und Japanisch ;-) ...

      Das besondere für mich im Vergleich zu einfachen To-Do-Listen sind hauptsächlich ein paar simple "constraints":
      - immer schön der Reihe nach: Seite für Seite, erst dann wieder von vorn
      - erst die Seite scannen, dann was wählen, was sich gut anfühlt
      - nix auf der Seite dabei? Dann fliegt alles restliche runter - will ich das wirklich oder nehm ich zumindest eins?
      - kein weiterer Punkt auf der Seite interessant? Das heißt warten bis zur Wiedervorlage bei der nächsten Runde ... will ich das wirklich oder dauert's dann zu lange ...?!?
      - manche netten/angenehmen/kleinen Dinge lass ich auch stehen, wenn nicht mehr viel auf den Seiten draufsteht -- damit ich bei der nächsten Runde noch ein "Schlupfloch" habe, wenn für die "unangenehmen" aber wichtigen Sachen keine Neigung da ist
      - Neues/Spontanes möglichst nicht zwischendurch einfach so machen sondern hinten auf die Liste setzen

      Das sind so für mich die Hauptdinge im Moment ... PLUS: "Do it with ease" ;-) ...

      Keine Ahnung, ob/was Mark Forster so damit verdient - den kannte ich bis vor kurzem noch gar nicht ... aber du hast recht: ich habe einen Punkt auf der To-Do-Liste: "entscheiden, ob ich das Buch 'do it tomorrow' von Mark Forster kaufe" :-)

      Liebe Grüße, Dirk

      Delete
  8. Mmmm... I'm happy with the current progress. I get things done quite nicely.

    The statistics might get discouraging though: My autofocus-list now has 317 entries, out of which 140 are worked on. This means I managed to work on 20 tasks since yesterday, but new 67 entries entered the list. The main reason for this number is that I took one old lengthy to-do-lists and integrated it to the autofocus-list, and that I took tasks from experimenting some time ago with kanbanery.com and integrated them also. That made 41 extra entries ... So without that would have 26 new entries, but have worked on 20 tasks. If it continues this way the list will be evergrowing ... I'm curious when I will first dissmiss anything from the list - this didn't happen yet, I always found at least a single thing to work on every page so far ...

    Another interesting experience is that the tasks I'm working on now tend to need longer time to work on, because the task that could be done quickly now tend to peter out ...

    Anyhow: motivation and satisfaction on my side are still high! So I'm looking forward to day 9+10!!! :-)

    ReplyDelete
  9. So this is getting interesting: today involved a reiteration of the list from the beginning (it's not the first one), and what now happens is that there's not much left to do on the first pages. On page 1 are now 3 things left, out of which I'm procrastinating 2 heavily (not totally true: I worked on related things to them already during this experiment!) and 1 doesn't make too much sense before other things are done. I only had a forth thing to do on this first page, and I picked that, now knowing the next time I will pass by I *have to* do something from the things left over or I would have to dismiss them. But at least for one that's not possible (or I get external punishment - guess what it is about ;-) ...), so I will have to do something about the next time ...

    Page 2 has now 4 things left, one I'm procrastenating, one I'm not in the mood to do right now but will another time. I did only one thing from page 2, but that took me 2 hours and was worthwhile and nescessary to do. So that's good and I feel I've done justice to page 2.

    Now I'm checking page 3 and that's interesting: I will stop here today and continue tomorrow. There are some more things on this page, but I already feel some of them can be easily dismissed. I'm curious when that will happen automatically "by the system".

    Another thing that strikes me on page 3 is the date I visited this page last: it's 7 days ago (of 5 days if you ignore the weekend I skipped). The iterations before were much quicker, like daily or every two days. This of course reflects on the length of the list of course and also on the length of tasks done. My impression is that I'm more and more working on tasks that take longer time than the tasks I worked on initially. But that feels nice, as I have the impression having accomplished the smaller tasks feels like having moved some clutter out of the way. And that's also beneficial for the longer tasks as I feel I can focus better and am more satisfied with the quality of the results.

    So here's some statistics: currently 324 entries on the list (means 7 new since yesterday), and 156 worked on (means 16 more than yesterday). Feels like today I was sort of catching up :-) ...

    Tomorrow: final day of the 10-day-challenge! :-)

    Anybody out there reading this? How about sharing your experience?!?

    ReplyDelete
  10. So ... I finished the 10-day challenge! Already last Friday, but then I got distracted by going to Frankfurt to the next coaching training segment with Barbara Sher. But that's a different story.

    It's amazing what I accomplished so far: 178 items worked on, 338 items on the list now.

    I noticed it's hard to get into it after being away for 2 intensive, inspiring but also energy consuming days -- and when I've then got a calendar filled with appointments.

    I also faced situations when there are quite pressing and uncomfortable things to do. I managed quite some in most of the day anyhow, but just today I just had to do some things, despite their place on the list - just because the time was pressing. So I needed some other ways to tweak me to do them (yes, it's related to the resistance-exercise I talked about in previous posts).

    Anyhow: the system is great, and I'm gonna continue up using it and explore it further. I'm really curious when I'm gonna cross out the first complete pages! :-) That moment can't be far away.

    Anyone still on the challenge?!? I heard from some people who tried it, some who didn't follow through and even different approaches. Let me know and share! Please!

    ReplyDelete