Autofocus with the Master List

The master list is one of my favorite tools. I love making lists and I usually make them by hand in a notebook because they’re simpler to work with.

Time management coach Mark Forster is a man after my own heart. He’s written several books about personal effectiveness and he’s now sharing his Autofocus system on his website for free.

The Autofocus system is simply what I described above, one very long list in a notebook that you keep adding to and crossing off of. The cool thing about this system is that it doesn’t involve prioritizing. Forster asserts that as you scan the list, you’ll be able to select the important items naturally, using the “balance between the rational and intuitive parts of your mind.”

This is really important because so much of procrastination results from just not really wanting to do things. People do what they do. If They don’t want to do a particular thing, they just won’t, no matter how “important” they’ve decided it is. This system forces you to be honest with yourself and either favorably recast (meaning figure out a way to achieve the same goal in a way that you prefer) or delete the to do’s that aren’t getting done.

List from Carissa GoodNCrazy’s photostream.