Pascal Finette, one of my Mozilla colleagues, just blogged about how he’s using Things with an Autofocus-inspired approach to getting stuff done (as opposed to Getting Things Done™). Pascal also discovered Autofocus via the recent Lifehacker article. As an also recovering GTDer and former Things user, I was interested to read about Pascal’s approach.
Before diving into Autofocus, I should talk about a high-level of what I’m looking for and why I stopped using Things. Paper doesn’t work well for me, because I don’t want to carry around a notebook. I always have my phone, so some way to access the data from my iPhone is important. Finally, I also have an iPad which is why I gave up on Things: the “cloud sync” never materialized, so synchronization is a hassle. I also thought that the total cost for Things (Mac+iPhone+iPad) is a bit out of line for a todo list ($80!).
One of the things that I like about Autofocus is that you review tasks on a page-by-page basis. This makes the notion of reviewing things less daunting and also aids the culling of the list to remove things that are never likely to actual feel like the most important thing to do. That’s an important aspect of Autofocus: doing what feels like it needs to be done and lightweight review is part of that.
I’ve been giving FocusPad a try. It’s available as a webapp (free!) and an iPhone app ($2) which automatically syncs with the web. FocusPad is designed specifically to support Autofocus. Your task list is separated into pages. When you finish a page, you can mark it so that it doesn’t show up any more when you navigate. You can cross an item off and re-add it to the last page (a common part of Autofocus). FocusPad also has a nice feature where you can move a task from one page to another on a given date, which means that you could create a “tickler” pad that will remind you of something you need to look at later.
On the whole, FocusPad looks like the most faithful, syncs-with-my-mobile implementation of Autofocus that I’ve seen. I wish it had keyboard shortcuts in the webapp and iPad support, but it certainly reaches the “good enough” level and I’ve enjoyed working with it so far.