Superfocus - Mark Forster's been at it again

Hi there.

Mark Forster, author of the Autofocus task management system and its variatons, has now released Superfocus. I have always found Mark's systems very helpful at capturing, and ultimately managing my list of tasks. His systems are generally quite powerful with their dismissal rules, so if there is a task that just sits around and never get's done, it is dismissed, which forces you to get a better understanding of why it seemed important yet you haven't progressed it. The other main benefit to Mark's systems are their relative simplicity.

In the past however, it has sometimes been hard to get the balance between important and urgent tasks right with Autofocus. The first Autofocus system tended to look after the big and important tasks, but didn't handle short notice/urgent tasks well, and the later variants handled recent, urgent tasks effectively, but sometimes they wouldn't steer you back to the older tasks if you were regularly getting new actions.

Mark thinks he has cracked it this time with Superfocus, and from an initial read, I can see how it might work. I'm going to try it, and comment later after I have given it a chance to prove itself.

I won't go over the rules here, I'll let you read them for yourself on Mark's blog. I can understand already however that it will be important to decide which tasks are Column 1 and which are Column 2...

Later.

A reminder to focus on what's important when overwhelmed

Over the last two weeks, I was reminded of the importance of seeking out the key aspect of a situation and focusing on it to get the best result.

I'm presently in the middle of a court action, which for legal reasons is best I don't describe in too much detail. When the facts according to the other side were presented, I was deeply hurt from some of the things that were claimed about myself, but also more than a little anxious about how best to tackle it, as the period of time being covered is approximately 30 years of my life!

As always with these things though, it is important to get decent advice, and it was brought to my attention that by concentrating on a key part of the case, it could be ruled in my favour. Thankfully, this particular part of the case has proven to be probably the simplest for us to build our defence upon.

I don't wish to appear cocky, as I am still to go to trial, but by being able to screen out a lot of the noise and concern over the entire period, and focus on a specific part of the case, it has been much easier to handle than I originally thought.

Perhaps later when everything is wrapped up, I might post on what happened so that others can learn from it, but in the meantime, I suggest you consider my recent experience when you are facing a difficult or overwhelming situation. Pareto's Principle or the 80:20 rule may apply more readily than you think, allowing you to then concentrate on what is key for getting through your issue. It is surprising how often there exists a situation where 20 % of the overall context, will account for 80 % of the outcome.

Later.