Getting confused by Areas of Focus
Stan
via web
Hi all,
Can you please provide some comments / explanations on my (mis)understanding of Areas of Focus? I have a hard time making the right distinction between AoF and Projects.
Here is a simplified example of my situation.
Let's say I have only 2 AoF: Work and Personal
At work, let's say my manager gives me 2 areas of responsibility (or that my bonus is calculated on the following 2 indicators)
+ Ensure that all customer complaints are treated within 10 days
+ Keep all employees happy
For the Personal side, I have 2 goals
+ Find True Love
+ Buy a house
Projects (and associated tasks / next actions) get created rather naturally within each :
+ For the customer complaints, I can I one project per costumer (Ms Fields, Mr Smith, etc.) and process each separately
+ For finding True Love, I can set up an account on Match.com (incl. filling in all the forms, send / reply to email, set dates, etc.), check if my friends know any eligible bachelors, etc. Each potential date can even become a project (*).
+ To keep employees happy, I can set-up a survey, interview everyone to understand what they want, organise a party, etc. Plenty of projects (in the sense of multi-step actions).
+ Buying a house also splits into multiple sub-projects such as doing on-line research, talking to the bank, gather info on the neighbourhood, etc.
So in the way I think, GTD lacks a "layer" between the projects (multi-step to-do's ) and the AoF (for what I call "Area of Responsibility" within Work).
My current work-around is to use the AoFs for those "super-projects" (I have about 15 of them -- not all active at once). It works fine, but I don't think this is "True GTD".
Final thing: I thought about using tags but I prefer to reserve tags for the good-old @email, @phone, etc.
Thanks for your comments.
s.
(*) Please do not tell any of my dates they are "projects" ;o)
Comments are currently closed for this discussion. You can start a new one.
2 Posted by Stan on 24 Aug, 2010 03:36 PM
As a side, I think the app GTDAgenda fits my way of thinking rather well.
But the layout is not as nice as Nirvana.
Ideally, the Nirvana folks would find a way to add the "Goal" layer on top of the Projects, and also add check-list capabilities (Premium feature?)
s.
3 Posted by Proximo on 25 Aug, 2010 04:08 PM
@Stan,
Let me see if I can help.
Context in GTD are Locations or Resources.
Areas of Focus are like Super Context that will filter the entire UI based on the area. Areas of Focus are designed to be used for Locations or Specific responsibilities.
Tags on the other hand should be used for your resource context.
Here is an example of my Areas of Focus and my Tags (Context)
Areas of Focus:
Work
Home
Personal
Business
Family
Finance
Health
Self Defense
Tags/Context:
email
call
internet
computer
office
errand
agenda
chore
bills
read
The Areas above are either location based or a specific responsibility that I want to filter by. They are not projects. Project are to be created and maintained in the Project list.
Let's say I arrived at Work. I don't really care to see all the task related to Home or Personal at the moment, so I switch to the "Work" AoF and now my entire UI is filtered by this location. All my GTD list are now specific to the Area I picked.
At the end of the day I leave and go Home. If I want to see the things I need to do related to my Home, I can switch to my "Home" area. If I want to see things that are more personal to me, I can switch to my "Personal" area.
Let's say I am at the computer later in the day and wanted to balance my accounts, check my savings or do anything related to my finances. I can switch to the "Finance" Area to check and see if they are tasks specific to this area of focus. It may be that I need to start saving for my Daughter's college or I need to pay the mortgage.
OK, Now that we know what Areas are for, let's drill further with Tags/Context.
We are back at work. We switch to the "Work" area so that we can only see tasks related to work only. If I am in the next list trying to see what I need to do, I can use Time, Energy and Context to filter my list down to what makes sense at the moment.
Note: I recommend you choose the Time and Energy in every task.
It's morning time and I have Medium Energy and about 4 hours before lunch. I can filter by 4 hours and Medium Energy. My list is smaller now. Now I can choose what the priorities are for the task in front of me by manually sorting them or I can choose to filter further by tag/context. Let's say in the morning I like to focus on emails. I can filter by my @email context to drill down to only the task that require that resource for me to complete.
Note: I use the "@" symbol to illustrate it's a context but I do not actually create my tags with the "@" symbol.
Using your Areas of Focus, Time, Energy and Context, you can really drill down to the best task for you to work on at any time of the day.
Hope this helps.
4 Posted by Stan on 25 Aug, 2010 06:40 PM
Thanks a lot Proximo,
Very useful, as usual.
I think I wanted to use the AoF also as a list of "triggers" for the weekly review. In other words, going through all the AoFs one by one and think "Do I need to add a project or action in order to move forward within this area of responsibility?".
In the example I gave in my original post (and what I do today), I choose the "Make employees happy" AoF, review the list of projects within, and may add / remove / modify the current "sub-components" of the AoF.
Based on what you say elsewhere, you track those "higher level goals" in a separate systems -- not in Nirvana.
Best,
s.
5 Posted by Hans on 15 Nov, 2010 09:10 PM
I was also confused about the Areas of Focus (AoF) and after reading all comments (especially those by Proximo) I can now understand why people may like them. But in the current AoF implementation the line between the different AoF is too sharp for me, because it's not possible (at least, not to my knowledge) to change the AoF of a task after it has been created. It was my plan to use the AoF as a context, but since you cannot change the AoF or remove it after task creation, this doesn't work for me.
So, given all the potentially good things of AoF, I really miss contexts. Because when I am in a meeting, I want to focus on my meeting's tasks, and want to see no other tasks at that time. Like an AoF, I want other tasks to vanish (this is why tags don't work for me). But I would like to be able to change the context after having created the tasks, for example from 'meeting 1' to 'train'. Or to remove it alltogether.
In my ideal implementation there would be the AoF functionality, providing a completely separate 'tasks environment' for those who like that. Then, there would be a contexts functionality next to that, similar to AoF but with the difference that a context is limited to one AoF, and that tasks can be shared between contexts, and that contexts can changed or removed.
An AoF is a permanent responsibility focus.
A context is a temporary attention focus, within an AoF.
Just my thoughts...
6 Posted by Proximo on 15 Nov, 2010 11:03 PM
@Hans
You can change the AoF you set for a task when ever you wish.
I also want to point people to another discussion that really started to clear the confusion some people had with Areas of Focus inside Nirvana.
I won't go over it again here, so here is the link.
http://goo.gl/noct5
David McLaughlin closed this discussion on 02 Feb, 2011 10:05 PM.