Every now and then my “getting things done” mechanism fades away gradually. Then while doing something I shouldn’t (such as reading this post) I get a signal telling me “hey, go back to pomodoros”. I go back, productive again. And after a while it fades away again.
Seems like to people like me, the best solution is to set random dates in our electronic calendars (cellphone for instance), far ahead in the future, with strong reminders that we shuould be using *productivity thing of your choice here”… so we don’t need charitable people like Elharo to tell us what we should have been doing :)
I was worried this would happen to me, so I started Beemindering my RTM tasks (and also pinning both an RTM tab and a Beeminder tab in Chrome). I have $5 riding on completing an average of 6 tasks a day. (You might object that this incentivizes me to break up my tasks into smaller tasks, which it totally does, and that is great.)
The top item in my to-do list reads: “If confused, make list! If confusion persists, make lists for lists!”
Point being, I think taskifying in order to avoid counting difficult, unpleasant tasks as one item is useful because it better mirrors reality. For (very ground-level) instance, eating enough meals in a day is hard for me to do consistently because “eat a meal” has a ton of steps: decide what to eat, find ingredients, assemble, and so on. So if I lie to myself and say it’s only one step, I feel bad about being so stupid for having trouble with Just One Step, and subsequently don’t do anything because I’m in an Ugh Field. If I acknowledge that if I am having trouble accomplishing something, that means it has multiple steps… well, I still do less than my fictional idealized self would do, but I still do more than otherwise.
I find that a lot of my friends have trouble grokking this because the rationalist/perfectionist ideacluster is heavily grouped. For some reason it’s hard to think about what a perfect rational agent would do without, at least somewhat and unconsciously, comparing oneself to that agent.
Every now and then my “getting things done” mechanism fades away gradually. Then while doing something I shouldn’t (such as reading this post) I get a signal telling me “hey, go back to pomodoros”. I go back, productive again. And after a while it fades away again.
Seems like to people like me, the best solution is to set random dates in our electronic calendars (cellphone for instance), far ahead in the future, with strong reminders that we shuould be using *productivity thing of your choice here”… so we don’t need charitable people like Elharo to tell us what we should have been doing :)
I was worried this would happen to me, so I started Beemindering my RTM tasks (and also pinning both an RTM tab and a Beeminder tab in Chrome). I have $5 riding on completing an average of 6 tasks a day. (You might object that this incentivizes me to break up my tasks into smaller tasks, which it totally does, and that is great.)
The top item in my to-do list reads: “If confused, make list! If confusion persists, make lists for lists!”
Point being, I think taskifying in order to avoid counting difficult, unpleasant tasks as one item is useful because it better mirrors reality. For (very ground-level) instance, eating enough meals in a day is hard for me to do consistently because “eat a meal” has a ton of steps: decide what to eat, find ingredients, assemble, and so on. So if I lie to myself and say it’s only one step, I feel bad about being so stupid for having trouble with Just One Step, and subsequently don’t do anything because I’m in an Ugh Field. If I acknowledge that if I am having trouble accomplishing something, that means it has multiple steps… well, I still do less than my fictional idealized self would do, but I still do more than otherwise.
I find that a lot of my friends have trouble grokking this because the rationalist/perfectionist ideacluster is heavily grouped. For some reason it’s hard to think about what a perfect rational agent would do without, at least somewhat and unconsciously, comparing oneself to that agent.
How long is “a while”? Hours? Weeks?
Weeks or Months, depending on so many factors it is not worth noting.