My parents were visiting this past weekend, so I broke up all my cleaning tasks over a week and assigned them to specific days in RTM. This got the job done, but one thing I notices is that cleaning took vastly less time than I imagined when I was dreading it. (Example: scrubbing my bathroom floor took about 10-12 min counting grabbing supplies and I had imagined about 20-30 min).
So I learned:
(a) I do have time to clean and put it at as recurring every other month task in RTM to assign these tasks over a week
(b) Ugh fields screw with my time estimates, leading me to procrastinate or strike goals entirely, since when will I ever find the time?
Two possible countermoves to (b):
Visualize in detail what the task requires, notice that cleaning my mirror cannot take more than 5 min. Go do it.
Do 5 or 10 min worth of work on a task so my estimate of how long it will take is more accurate. It’s fine to not complete the task during the trial, but if I’m surprised by how close I am to done, go for it!
I think I favor 2, since I’ll have an easier time psyching myself up for “Five minutes of data gathering! My model of the world is getting more accurate” than experiencing something I don’t want to do twice, once as visualization, once as reality. I’ll try to find another task to test this way this week. Something I expect will take a while, but that I also notice I don’t like.
My parents were visiting this past weekend, so I broke up all my cleaning tasks over a week and assigned them to specific days in RTM. This got the job done, but one thing I notices is that cleaning took vastly less time than I imagined when I was dreading it. (Example: scrubbing my bathroom floor took about 10-12 min counting grabbing supplies and I had imagined about 20-30 min).
So I learned: (a) I do have time to clean and put it at as recurring every other month task in RTM to assign these tasks over a week (b) Ugh fields screw with my time estimates, leading me to procrastinate or strike goals entirely, since when will I ever find the time?
Two possible countermoves to (b):
Visualize in detail what the task requires, notice that cleaning my mirror cannot take more than 5 min. Go do it.
Do 5 or 10 min worth of work on a task so my estimate of how long it will take is more accurate. It’s fine to not complete the task during the trial, but if I’m surprised by how close I am to done, go for it!
I think I favor 2, since I’ll have an easier time psyching myself up for “Five minutes of data gathering! My model of the world is getting more accurate” than experiencing something I don’t want to do twice, once as visualization, once as reality. I’ll try to find another task to test this way this week. Something I expect will take a while, but that I also notice I don’t like.