1. breaking large projects down into small steps. I think this would pay off in a lot of ways: lower context switching costs, work generally easier, greater feelings of traction and satisfaction, instead of “what the hell did I do last week? I guess not much”. This is challenging because my projects are, at best ill-defined knowledge work, and sometimes really fuzzy medical or emotional work. I strongly believe the latter have paid off for me on net, but individual actions are often lottery tickets with payouts in an undetermined currency.
2. prioritizing. There’s both “what’s the top priority?” and “what will reach this priority the fastest?” and they both feel pretty complicated.
It’s pretty goofy but for the past year I’ve had monthly calendar printouts hanging on my wall, and each day I put tally marks for how many hours of focused work I did, and usually scrawl a word or two about what I was doing that day, and when I figure out something important I draw a little star on that day of the calendar and write a word or two reminding myself of what it is (and celebrate that night by eating my favorite kind of ice cream sandwich). This is mostly stolen from the book Deep Work (not the ice cream sandwiches though, that’s my own innovation). Having those sheets hanging on my wall is good for “what did I do last week” or “what kinds of stuff was I doing last April” or “oh where has the time gone” type questions to myself.
I also have a to-do list using an online kanban tool and I always move tasks into a Done column instead of just archiving them directly. This is entirely pointless, because now and then I’ll go through the Done column and archive everything. So I added an extra step that does nothing. But it feels nice to get an extra opportunity to revisit the Done column and feel good about how many things I’ve done. :)
individual actions are often lottery tickets with payouts in an undetermined currency
I feel your pain, but anyway those were things you wanted to do. In some sense, the information “this doesn’t work” is also a payout, just not the one you hoped for, but that is hindsight. If your best guess was that this was worth doing, then actually doing it is a legitimate work done, even if it ultimately didn’t achieve what you hoped for.
There is some kind of “doublethink” necessary. On one hand, we ultimately care about the results. Mere effort that doesn’t bring fruit is a waste (or signalling, that detracts from the intended goal). On the other hand, in everyday life we need to motivate ourselves by rewarding the effort, because results come too infrequently and sometimes are too random, and we want to reward following a good strategy rather than getting lucky. (Also: goals vs systems.)
There’s both “what’s the top priority?” and “what will reach this priority the fastest?” and they both feel pretty complicated.
Perhaps we should always add “according to my current knowledge” at the end of these question, just to remind ourselves that sometimes the right thing to do is stop prioritizing and collect more information instead.
Many outliner apps can already do that, and from what I can tell this doesn’t even require plugins. You mention Roam, but there are also e.g. Logseq (free) and Tana (outliner with extensive AI features; currently lacks smooth onboarding; is in beta with a waitlist, but one can get an instant auto invite by introducing oneself in their Slack channel).
I personally don’t use outliners anymore after learning from Workflowy that I absolutely need the ability to write non-nested stuff like long-form text, so I unfortunately can’t tell if those apps are a good fit for people who do like outliners.
Anyway, after clicking around in Logseq, here’s how your requested feature looks there: Whenever you open the app, it loads a Journal page of the current day where you’d add the tasks you want to do that day. Then tasks marked as TODO or DONE can be found in the graph view, like so.
In Roam, these TODO and DONE pages supposedly also exist (from what I can tell from here, anyway), so the same strategy should work there, too.
And in Tana, you can probably also do things just like this; or you would add tasks anywhere (including on a project page), then mark tasks with a #task tag so Tana treats them like items in a database, and then you’d add a Done Date field to tasks.
Problems I am trying to figure out right now:
1. breaking large projects down into small steps. I think this would pay off in a lot of ways: lower context switching costs, work generally easier, greater feelings of traction and satisfaction, instead of “what the hell did I do last week? I guess not much”. This is challenging because my projects are, at best ill-defined knowledge work, and sometimes really fuzzy medical or emotional work. I strongly believe the latter have paid off for me on net, but individual actions are often lottery tickets with payouts in an undetermined currency.
2. prioritizing. There’s both “what’s the top priority?” and “what will reach this priority the fastest?” and they both feel pretty complicated.
It’s pretty goofy but for the past year I’ve had monthly calendar printouts hanging on my wall, and each day I put tally marks for how many hours of focused work I did, and usually scrawl a word or two about what I was doing that day, and when I figure out something important I draw a little star on that day of the calendar and write a word or two reminding myself of what it is (and celebrate that night by eating my favorite kind of ice cream sandwich). This is mostly stolen from the book Deep Work (not the ice cream sandwiches though, that’s my own innovation). Having those sheets hanging on my wall is good for “what did I do last week” or “what kinds of stuff was I doing last April” or “oh where has the time gone” type questions to myself.
I also have a to-do list using an online kanban tool and I always move tasks into a Done column instead of just archiving them directly. This is entirely pointless, because now and then I’ll go through the Done column and archive everything. So I added an extra step that does nothing. But it feels nice to get an extra opportunity to revisit the Done column and feel good about how many things I’ve done. :)
I feel your pain, but anyway those were things you wanted to do. In some sense, the information “this doesn’t work” is also a payout, just not the one you hoped for, but that is hindsight. If your best guess was that this was worth doing, then actually doing it is a legitimate work done, even if it ultimately didn’t achieve what you hoped for.
There is some kind of “doublethink” necessary. On one hand, we ultimately care about the results. Mere effort that doesn’t bring fruit is a waste (or signalling, that detracts from the intended goal). On the other hand, in everyday life we need to motivate ourselves by rewarding the effort, because results come too infrequently and sometimes are too random, and we want to reward following a good strategy rather than getting lucky. (Also: goals vs systems.)
Perhaps we should always add “according to my current knowledge” at the end of these question, just to remind ourselves that sometimes the right thing to do is stop prioritizing and collect more information instead.
some features I definitely want in an app:
* ~infinitely nested plans similar to workflowy or roam
* when I check off a task on a plan, it gets added to a “shit I did on this date” list. I can go to that page and see what I did on various days
Out of curiosity, did Roam turn out to support the functionality I mentioned in my other comment here?
Many outliner apps can already do that, and from what I can tell this doesn’t even require plugins. You mention Roam, but there are also e.g. Logseq (free) and Tana (outliner with extensive AI features; currently lacks smooth onboarding; is in beta with a waitlist, but one can get an instant auto invite by introducing oneself in their Slack channel).
I personally don’t use outliners anymore after learning from Workflowy that I absolutely need the ability to write non-nested stuff like long-form text, so I unfortunately can’t tell if those apps are a good fit for people who do like outliners.
Anyway, after clicking around in Logseq, here’s how your requested feature looks there: Whenever you open the app, it loads a Journal page of the current day where you’d add the tasks you want to do that day. Then tasks marked as TODO or DONE can be found in the graph view, like so.
In Roam, these TODO and DONE pages supposedly also exist (from what I can tell from here, anyway), so the same strategy should work there, too.
And in Tana, you can probably also do things just like this; or you would add tasks anywhere (including on a project page), then mark tasks with a #task tag so Tana treats them like items in a database, and then you’d add a Done Date field to tasks.