It always blows my mind when people who claim to have issues with focus or task management then go on to talk about how they've automated tons of trivial tasks. That sounds like the OPPOSITE of someone who has issues with focus.
There are people who are so task focused that they waste a lot of energy worrying that they're not working on the right task! If you're at all like me, then this is a foreign concept. The introduction to GTD hints that it is specifically targeted at people like this to reduce their anxieties. It also caused me to stop reading the book because, as I said, that concept is mostly foreign to me (I have observed it in others, but my empathy is insufficient to truly understand it).
There are also people w/o the anxieties, who live their lives as firefighters. Every day take on the emergencies!
That was me for a long time. When you have a job that is constantly filled with fires you can survive for a long time doing this. The problem is that sometimes a non-fire tasj can start out as low priority but eventually become the most important thing you have to do today all based on a due date. Unless you are good at managing your future tasks, you'll often miss them.
I never had anxieties about getting things out the door, mostly because my bosses were constantly chopping down one or two of the legs of my stool (money, time, resources). But it was easy for me to keep pushing a low priority task to the bottom of the list because its not due yet, totally forgetting about the fact that eventually it will be due.
"focus" problems very often are "hyperfocus" problems where we can get really zoned into whatever we're doing but make poor choices about where that focus lies. Think of it as a difference in executive function rather than a focus issue.
