My Autofocus statistics

I summarized finally how I used Autofocus in April. The yellow line shows how many new tasks were added each day (30 in average), the red line shows the tasks done that day (20 in average). The 10 extra tasks a day didn’t just accumulate, I got rid of them by dismissing about 1 page daily. I spend roughly 10-15 minutes on a task, though it may vary from a few minutes to an hour.

Spreading the word

I recommended this site to a friend.  I just talked to him, he had printed and read the Hungarian translation of the Autofocus system, and has been using it for a month how.  He loves it.  It feels great to be a successful prophet.

Dolgomvan.hu

This is the follow up to my recent post about Facebook (FB) and time management. I searched the existing FB Application stock, and there is only one candidate for the desired purpose.

Dolgomvan.hu is a Hungarian developed web application defined as “GTD-style”. Sadly, there is no sharing your todos or posting of the crossed-out items to your profile/status and that is my main idea. No offline tools at the moment either to edit todos.

I can only see the missing features, but the ease of use is really amazing. It is sympathetic, that in the original version you are given the choice to save your data in xml, to opt-out easily, and they are even preparing the possibility to reach your data through an API.

Give it a try yourself let me know how you liked it.

Write little and often

There was a discussion on the Autofocus forum if this method could be used for writing.  Some argued writing needs to be difficult.  I experimented with a “little and often” approach to it.  It goes like this.
The text has marks in it (I’ll tell you more in a minute).  The whole process is iterating these steps.

1. Pick a marked part and work on it.  Write as much as you like, be it only a line or many paragraphs.
2. If you feel it isn’t finished yet, put a mark at the end of it.

A mark consists of

• some special character not used elsewhere in your text (e.g. the “#” sign)
• a page number in Autofocus sense
• an index within a page, I use letters for this

So the very first mark is #1a, then #1b, #1c, etc.  Since there are 26 letters, you can have 26 items on one page.  You can have as many pages as you want, but I prefer to have only one-digit page numbers, so when I’m done with the first page (with marks #1a, …, #1z), I start numbering pages from 1 again.

An Autofocus-like discipline can be applied, too.  In the first round, pick a part whose mark starts with #1.  In the next round, you can pick any part that starts with #1, or if there is none, move on to the #2 parts.