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Autofocus gives you a simple list and easy fun rules to guide your proces

I recently read about this system by Mark Forster. Autofocus is a todolist system based on simple rules, and an in-built trust in your own innate ability to sense the right thing to do right now.

The autofocus system will appeal to people with a fondness for paperbased systems, and particularly the Moleskine Crowd.

Here's how Mark Forster describes it himself:

1. Read quickly through all the items on the page without taking action on any of them. 2. Go through the page more slowly looking at the items in order until one stands out for you. 3. Work on that item for as long as you feel like doing so 4. Cross the item off the list, and re-enter it at the end of the list if you haven’t finished it 5. Continue going round the same page in the same way. Don’t move onto the next page until you complete a pass of the page without any item standing out 6. Move onto the next page and repeat the process 7. If you go to a page and no item stands out for you on your first pass through it, then all the outstanding items on that page are dismissed without re-entering them. (N.B. This does not apply to the final page, on which you are still writing items). Use a highlighter to mark dismissed items. 8. Once you’ve finished with the final page, re-start at the first page that is still active.

I like several things about the autofocus system:

1. it's compact

I love to be able to walk around with my system all the time. Capturing ideas depends on this. I must admit that my Iphone with Omnifocus is used a lot less, than I had imagined. My test-run of autofocus had me capture more stuff, and remembering more as well.

2. it's simple

It's not complicated. I tend to lose my perspective when everything is sorted in projects and contexts. Especially the context part of GTD makes less sense to me than ever. I don't really need anything besides @work and @home. Autofocus urges to have two lists. One for work and one for private stuff.

3. it gets rid of old todo-list garbage

The idea of dismissing old items when you look at a page without anything standing appeals to me a lot. The thing I get rid of this way, is the non-doable things, that seems to creep into every todo-list I make. In autofocus you highlight it, and then someday later you can review these dismissed items and totally forget them, put them on a someday/maybe list og or re-enter them in another form.

4. it's fast!

You can do this really fast. With 22 lines per page, you can quickly skim a page. Adding new items is lightning fast. And since you never grow your list to more than 10-15 pages, findign something is actually quite simple.

5. it's in a moleskine

Well... you gotta love a moleskine. I love touching them. I love carrying them. I love looking at them. Well... maybe it's just me :)

Anyways... that's it. A simple analouge system that you can check out at the blog of Mark Forster. The decribtion of the system is a mere 6 pages in the printer. So go ahead read about it. I have been using it for my home stuff for a week now, and I'm pretty happy. I am considering moving my someday/maybe lists into Taskpaper, but that's another story.

Oh... by the way... drawing  on the top was made with wonderful children focused drawing app: Doozla.

• Jens Poder