#EXAMPLE: when I want to get five things done and I kind of know I only have time or energy for three of them but all the things are Very High Priority and unacceptable to leave unfinished, I sometimes find myself making plans for accomplishing the things that are pretty unrealistic if I’m honest with myself. Here the fake option is “get all the things done by trying hard and believing in myself”, and what actually happens is that some random subset of the things will not get done when people expect them to and I’ll feel bad about myself and also people will judge me for not doing what I said I’d do. Whereas the actually existing options involve prioritizing and deciding in advance which things I’ll do and which I’ll delay, based on those things’ actual urgency, and letting affected people know this in advance.
or similarly, sometimes I want to finish a task tonight and also make it to a thing in the morning tomorrow and get some more stuff done tomorrow, and it’s kind of late, and I think “well I can stay up late and finish it, I won’t get quite enough sleep tonight but I can catch up later”, but often that’s not a real option because if I’m sleep-deprived enough I might be really bad at doing things tomorrow, or indeed just sleep through my alarm clock.
in both of these cases a complication is that.… the fake option is sometimes real? it’s a bad gamble usually but like, sometimes I do manage to do all five very important big tasks on my list, sometimes I do manage to have a productive day on five hours of sleep. this feeds the wishful thinking, I think.
(I’ve gotten better at forecasting my own success rates at this kind of thing over time and making choices accordingly, and at communicating with people in ways that avoid overpromising, though I do still have this kind of issue sometimes.)
#EXAMPLE: when I want to get five things done and I kind of know I only have time or energy for three of them but all the things are Very High Priority and unacceptable to leave unfinished, I sometimes find myself making plans for accomplishing the things that are pretty unrealistic if I’m honest with myself. Here the fake option is “get all the things done by trying hard and believing in myself”, and what actually happens is that some random subset of the things will not get done when people expect them to and I’ll feel bad about myself and also people will judge me for not doing what I said I’d do. Whereas the actually existing options involve prioritizing and deciding in advance which things I’ll do and which I’ll delay, based on those things’ actual urgency, and letting affected people know this in advance.
or similarly, sometimes I want to finish a task tonight and also make it to a thing in the morning tomorrow and get some more stuff done tomorrow, and it’s kind of late, and I think “well I can stay up late and finish it, I won’t get quite enough sleep tonight but I can catch up later”, but often that’s not a real option because if I’m sleep-deprived enough I might be really bad at doing things tomorrow, or indeed just sleep through my alarm clock.
in both of these cases a complication is that.… the fake option is sometimes real? it’s a bad gamble usually but like, sometimes I do manage to do all five very important big tasks on my list, sometimes I do manage to have a productive day on five hours of sleep. this feeds the wishful thinking, I think.
(I’ve gotten better at forecasting my own success rates at this kind of thing over time and making choices accordingly, and at communicating with people in ways that avoid overpromising, though I do still have this kind of issue sometimes.)